Amend the night and listen to it buzz. Butts of cigarettes rest in the ashtray, coax the sweet dampness of the equinox deep into their filters. evensongs, footnotes of the highway’s rev, found coiling around the day like kudzu, gagging the ultraviolet quiet out. Here is the still, collective unconscious. Idée fixe. Jargon to honor … Continue reading
1. We lived one summer without walls. No sheetrock, just cherry brick from outside and the slivers of light that stretched between the cracks. We could hear the fruit man’s lucid voice through the skeleton of our row home. He called cantaloupe and watermelon, grapes and apples and then laughed a bit as the clicking … Continue reading
Your Calvin days were black boots, black pants, black shirt, black beret, and black sports coat, Goth before Goth, and then the herky-jerk ride with your parents from Michigan to Iowa City, the matchstick game from Last Year at Marrienbad we played for free drinks in Kenny’s, infinite pool with Willy and Jones in Donnelly’s, … Continue reading
The Latin Professor lives in the country drives a little red pickup, fills its box with grass seed, Omalene for his horses, the Georgics of Virgil. The philosophy professor drives a big black pickup. He carries Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida and Foucalt. He needs wide tires, eight cylinders. The German professor rides his bike, his saddlebags … Continue reading
His little son beside him, the philosophy professor pulls his big, black pickup over, halloas at the crazy old poet walking in the twilight. He is taking the boy beyond the city’s lights to the country to watch Venus rising. The old poet trudges along, a fist full of stars in her hand, stars caught … Continue reading
The followers claimed his face glowed with celestial light, so it was forbidden for human hands to depict it. Although he never claimed anything except inspiration, never mentioned resurrection, yet some authorities think he’s back. The Dalai Lama smiles as if he knows, but he’s not telling. Lord Vishnu says he found him incognito wearing … Continue reading
I am at a party, control of which was eaten away at least two hours ago, and, hell, I am the host, the guy who should pull things in, keep them civil, only I’m the one who ate away civility… I yell at my ex-wife who is with a man who used to be my … Continue reading
This was a temple—now a room only a god could fill, no walls, no ceiling. Or this might have been a house. Now a diorama with stick figures in toothpick canoes, two inch bear and cat, a priest in miniscule mask. Or this was a water tower. Or this was a lookout post. What’s vacillation … Continue reading
It is the last night of solitude: I admire the vase of fresh flowers on my one table and sit up late stubbing cigarettes into an old tin can on my porch. The sky feels too wide for fall, too sweaty and open, panting after a full day of sun. I don’t think of anything … Continue reading
I know little of weaving but that I can pull together these strings of loneliness and fashion some sort of shroud to drape across my empty shelves. The hills cradle my house and my half-empty bed, but I am no more a fixed point than love. What is there in a landscape that says settle: … Continue reading
Coe Review 