The New Republic

                             —Mississippi, 1940 READ MORE >>

At work in the upper field,                                                    hay tops little buddhas,Calming the meadow and all its attendant tributaries,Porcupine, Basin Creek and God's blue hand like a skillet lidPressing us down to infinity—We thought it was up, but it turns out it's down, Jack, down.Either way we're stuck in the middle,                                                                      not a bad place to be. Later, sun like a struck medallionOver the west edge of things, READ MORE >>

We'd watch the news on my portable Philco.The jungle was black and white.  The bodies were black and white. The whole house strained in its silence.  I was 1A. One night my old man threw an alarm clock across my room.He screamed something, but all I caught was a cheap alarm clock, the size of a softball, ringing in the wallboard. The screen flickered.  The jungle snowed gray, the bodies gray. The alarm clock, stuck in the wallboard, rang for a minute or more.  Nobody touched it for days. READ MORE >>

Bending over rows of four o’clocksnow wet with evening, he picks offdead blooms, tipping their seedsinto an envelope for next year,though he knows he won’t be here.Through the screen door, I smellcut grass, wild onion, gasoline.Under his T-shirt stained green,his skin’s already begun to yellowlike a window shade finally ruinedby too much smoke and sun.Gloaming is not the word for hownight shows up, draping the city skywhose trapped sulfur and junk-lightfight off true dark. He looks up READ MORE >>

              I was at home under the shade of the gumbo-limbo tree Reading the story of what happened to the little elephant with unbridled                Curiosity.  Still, I ask too many questions, even now.               I was imagining the common turtle on his Lucite island In the hollow of the claw-foot tub in our attic dying off with               Little drama all that summer long, the water getting imperceptibly                More shallow every day, while I was riding brindled horses READ MORE >>

                         You were my crib;then my cellar cell, whose overhead            door I banged on night                            and day to wake you; then my grave—           but no, you weren’t a coffin                               exactly. I was in—               suspended animation. Inside an escape pod.            Nightly your computer took a breath for me.                         26,000 years later,     as the hatch blew open, I rubbed   READ MORE >>

“We are at the beginning of another ‘Georgian period,’ which may take rank in due time with the several great poetic ages of the past,” wrote Edward Marsh in 1912. And for a brief moment, such confidence seemed plausible. READ MORE >>

America, I would like to get closer to you, butyou are the unconscious patient; one hundred internsbicker this morning above your bed. Yesterday,I read for no reason an essay written a decade agoon game theory & economics. Apparently, the problemwith accurate predictions is that sometimes peoplesimply don’t make the rational choice. Illness & sleepare weary metaphors. The poor, who are now homeless,displaced by the storm, rest their heads tonightin luxury beachfront hotel rooms. All I want, READ MORE >>

There are not many poets whose fame rests on a single work. George Meredith (1828–1909), conspicuous in his time as both a novelist and a poet, never became a convincing poet on the order of Hardy or Lawrence. READ MORE >>

We thought we wanted something cuddly,or at the very least, transparent.But everything has a bit of murk about itthese days, especially at this time of year.The box Carol is standing catty-corner tomay contain an antidote to your particular disease,or it may contain nothing at all.Better stick with the stuffed partridge,which can always serve as a token. No onewill ask you for what, or why its feet arepainted that “strange” color. READ MORE >>