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Selected Poems

My Car

An unraveling marriage, a phobic non-driver, a father’s permission

A Summer Of Mowing Lawns

“Murine, is that you?” they’d call from behind the six-foot stockade fence that separated my yard from theirs. I’d come around the fence and see Herbert smiling and Wilda holding a plant. Wilda did most of the talking.

The Prayer Of The Body III

An Interview With Stephen R. Schwartz

This body only appears to be an enclosure. It is actually a passageway — like an entry to a cave or a cathedral. It is quite the opposite of the way we’ve been taught to perceive it.

That Lazy Old Alligator Mr. Time

Talk

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

Hella Hammid

I’d asked Hella to send me more photographs. Months later she wrote back, apologizing for the delay. “I have looked death squarely in the face most of last year,” she said. “I have cancer but am fighting it with everything I’ve got. This is why I haven’t come up with new work, but I’ll begin again soon.”

Blood For Oil

June 1992

The Map I Was Promised

Things I didn’t get to last week: answering the mail, giving up coffee, saving the planet.

Living Simply

At fifty-five, I look back on a life so complicated that had I set out to make things hard for myself, I couldn’t have done a better job.