Vol. 2, No. 4 Contents

She's so angry with me, the scissors buttermelt from the friction when I cut her hair. She fruitchecks my cheek and hostage negotiates the soggy clippers out of my hand.

Their legs are trees. He jaguars into the room. He stalks in pajamouflage. A tree root guts him with an upkick, flips him, stunned. He looks up like he's down in the lesson tub looking up at Father. A man's smile wavers in a whiskey glass.

Trains run late. They always run late. Do they even have a schedule?

Last day of winter won't disappoint. Rain one degree from the gentleness of snow rides the added chill of March wind bruising skin blue, or red, dreary, dismal. Olson called it dour.

More interested in finding than knowing. The symposia throng, led by panels, almost political, mostly American, addressing the question, 'What is American about American poetry?'

Working on a foundation reminiscent of a screened-in porch I helped my family build when I was a kid, only much larger. Carting wheelbarrows of sand for the cement mixer & concrete blocks. Old friends showed up…

I lay here in limber fish

(I am not a rice paper kite)

tormented by the wrappers…

After a bath

my very clean ass

said the sign

in the parking lot

Or Frogs

I tell her she's superstitious

she fires back:

"You're a poor excuse for a skeptic."

She believes in miracles…

but I can't forget           there is your story

like the heavy shoulders

of the sea, how the north

star would be named Melville,

would sit about the broad sky…

Open on the desk Kafka

                                        is flying in his little bucket

     the drops of ink he spilled while becoming aloft

form the profile of a woman's swan neck…

Sick maybe, and if so yes for home, but not homesick,

that place where vast pastures continue as horizons—

but scared, and hoping as in a game with friendly players

they let you take back a wrong move. That something…

Nothing is motionless, not the painted portrait

blinking while you're away

whose acids are discoloring buttons, whose frame

is oxidizing while moistening its eyes…

The ocean unfolds itself. The tongue stays put,

unreadable and needless.

We come to watch, speechless to the lake

where dragonflies dip their abdomens like brushes…