Poetry
Autumn 1989
Pope’s House
Everything goes like clockwork in Pope’s house. Outdoors, I watch a ridge go up in smoke. In here, it’s calm. Everything’s methodical. There’s not a sound. I’ve never seen lumber […]
Poetry
Autumn 1989
First Day of School
Like some petty official in his suit the new geometry teacher confronts a solid stare—thirty ninth-grade boys, the sum of their cold curiosity. He remembers all too well when he […]
Poetry
Winter 1986
An Introduction to New Jersey
The Eskimo has fifty words for snow. (an anthropological truism) Consider our gentler tundra,say U.S. 3 West, near midnight,the slow, spiraling climbout of Lincoln Tunnel—how as you rise the wholemidtown skyline […]
Poetry
Winter 1986
Ulysses and the Sirens
I never had much curiosityabout that first queasy stepdown on the moon. But who hasn’thankered secretly to know exactlywhat Ulysses heard or saw?Who hasn’t envied him a little,shackled to his […]
Poetry
Winter 1986
The History of the Wedge
In the brisk, pleasant voice of a surgeonintroducing his choice operationthe Air Force assured us how strictlyprofessional it is: Armament,radius, objective: each word neutralas a steel tool rinsed and drawn […]
Poetry
Winter 1986
Jealousy
Jealousy is no more a form of paranoiathan is any other art form that would locatesome pattern in our experience. W. H. FINN Without it nothing would make enough sense.Alone, he […]
Poetry
Winter 1986
A Personal History of the Curveball
It came to us like sex.Years before we ever faced the thingwe’d heard about the curveand studied it. Aerial photossnapped by night in Life, mappingEwell “The Whip” Blackwell’s sidearm hook,made […]