The doctor fingers my bruise. “Magnificent,” he says, “black at the edges and purple cored.” Seated, he spies for clues… gingerly probing the slack

Pond snipe, bleached pine, rue wee… I walk by sedge and brown river ro… to where the old lake boats went d… All the ships are gone, the gray w… in upon itself. Even the channel’s

If you were twenty-seven and had done time for beating our ex-wife and had no dreams you remembered in the morning, you might

She wakens early remembering her father rising in the dark lighting the stove with a match scraped on the floor. Then measuri… water for coffee, and later the sm…

This has nothing to do with war or the end of the world. She dreams there are gray starlings on the winter lawn and the buds of next year’s oranges alongside

Earth and water without form, change, or pause: as if the third day had not come, this calm norm of chaos denies the Word. One sees only a surface

Since I don’t know who will be re… this or even if it will be read, I… invent someone on the other end of eternity, a distant cousin labo… under the same faint stars I labor…

When Nellie, my old pussy cat, was still in her prime, she would sit behind me as I wrote, and when the line got too long she’d reach

Early March. The cold beach deserted. My kids home in a bare house, bundled up and listening to rock music pirated from England. My wife

Seven years ago I went into the High Sierras stunned by the d… to die. For hours I stared into a… mountain stream that fell down over speckled rocks, and then I

The winter sun, golden and tired, settles on the irregular army of bottles. Outside the trucks jostle toward the open road, outside it’s Saturday afternoon,

Brooklyn, 1929. Of course Crane’s been drinking and has no idea who this curious Andalusian is, unable even to speak the language of poet… The young man who brought them

When the Lieutenant of the Guardi… heard the automatic go off, he tur… and took the second shot just abov… the sternum, the third tore away the right shoulder of his uniform,

“I’ve been where it hurts.” the K… He becomes Sierra Kid I passed Slimgullion, Morgan Min… Camp Seco, and the rotting Lode. Dark walls of sugar pine —,

Hearing of the death of Larry Levis this past May, Jane Cooper, one of my oldest (and surely my dearest) friends in poetry, wrote me a consoling letter, one that...