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Selected Poems

The Wreck

Shirley Moody got sick in our house that night from sunburn, and that night — two nights after my ninth birthday — my daddy had a little too much whiskey and drove the Austin-Healey through the fence down on the canal.

Talk

My father brought Jake’s body home from Colorado in a record-breaking blizzard.

Luzianne

It’s funny how the absence of someone who wasn’t ever really there feels. It’s not like a hurt, it’s more like a bruise you don’t notice till you bump it. Then it stings. But only for a second, only for as long as it takes me to put my mind on happier things.

Drowning

At the age of two, I saw the ocean for the first time. I threw wide my short arms and ran shouting, straight into the Pacific, where an undertow reached out to embrace me. I still remember the upside-down whirlpool of warmth, like the womb out of which I’d so recently swum.

Tumbleweed

A thousand stars, a billion. Thundering silence. It’s Tom who reaches over. He puts his hand on my chest and says, “I wish we had more grass,” and leaves it there. Till I curl up beside him.

Homecoming

A tiny duckling, a bullethole in the ceiling, chocolate chip cookies and bomb craters

He Wears Black

I am a German man. That is clear. But I am born in the year 1955. Ten years after the war is over and so, I am having nothing to do with that war. I am part of the new people in Germany.

In The War-Torn Heart Of The House

Bucky, it’s Tuesday, May 9. I’m in the records vault using the old IBM to hammer this one out to you, my dictaphone account of how it went the last night at our house and about my return to Trent (still minimum security).

Darrell

I liked my truck. I liked to put all my blocks in the back and cart them from room to room. But I loved Merry’s doll.