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Dropping The Bottle Of Perfume My Mother Always Wore

The Cancerous Dog

The Next Day

The Physics Of Suspension

When she finished saying she was sorry, I hung up without a word and stood before the phone, blushing. The wooden earrings my mother had given me a few years before burned in my earlobes. Hadn’t I just spoken to her the night before? No, the week before. But she and my father were still there, in California, and they were all right. I trusted them to be there always, like gravity, or paychecks.

Alive In The Dying

I am amazed to think that my own life includes writing poems and repairing windmills. It is as if I have two lives that have mysteriously become one.

Baccalà

I was not home the day my grandfather Nonno died, but my brothers were, and they told me how my father had received the news. It was a couple of weeks before Christmas, and my brothers, Johnny and Peter, were visiting my father at his law office.

Grave Matters

Two weeks ago I turned forty-six. Four lovers and numerous friends and family have so far died before me. By most estimates I am closer to my death than to my birth.

Sunbeams

It’s never been my experience that men part with life any more readily at eighty than they do at eighteen.

Anthony Gilbert

Teeth, Death, My Friend Louise

I’m forty-one, but my nine-year-old son persists in thinking I’m only forty. He’s at that phase when children become obsessed with their parents’ mortality, and for him this takes the guise of frequent (incorrect) recitations of my age, my birth date, and how old I’ll be on my next birthday.

Ending It All

i called my brother a fag / and he ended it all / at fifteen he was peeled from the shiny red snow / fully nude / with his dick in his hand