Stories Collection

  1. The ring sits on a box and she doesn't know, She can't remember who put it there. Dus...
  2. Please listen, there's a thing back there I killed that's spiritual and has two wings...
  3. Oh you who pass like a day and never a soul that sees you guesses who you are as you ...
  4. 1 Having been to the stiff edge of her bed where harm is lately done and she squints ...
  5. There is no reason for me to keep counting how long it has been since you were here a...
  6. This very evening I reach the age you were when you died I look through the decades d...
  7. So you are leaving everything the way it is taking only your day with you already you...
  8. Those lilies of the field, one Sunday night I got caught in Pocono traffic and sat th...
  9. Something is too late, her walk, her look? Those in the know know: she could fix it w...
  10. Because you keep turning toward me what I suppose must be my own features only backwa...
  11. I have heard so much about you if you claim to be you I will know it is not true if y...
  12. & Sometime later I am on an airplane Thinking about prison narratives, How very attac...
  13. I meant the personal and the social, or call it the historical if you like, I mean I ...
  14. At the ceremony commemorating me, my family laid a gold cloth over my face, and I was...
  15. Don't think the story moves before us like a single file of horses passing along a ho...
  16. Oh dear where do you keep yourself whose least footstep wakens all those sentences th...
  17. They know so much more now about the heart we are told but the world still seems to c...
  18. Nothing matters but the quality of the affection, neither the bicyclist riding by in ...
  19. Hornets, two hornets buzz over my head; I'm napping and cannot keep my eyes open. Do ...
  20. Loosened and then opened by the opiate drops, she's nowhere now. Wreathed by a white ...
  21. Even now I suppose you are hiding in the daylight the way you always do granting only...
  22. Everything else must have changed must be different by the time you appear more than ...
  23. Not enough has been said ever in your praise hushed mornings before the year turns ne...
  24. Leader with a bleak vision, fled downhill to Boone Creek, forsaken valley in western ...
  25. Me and my critic, me and my wife, a dog that doesn't love me, he and his bloodshot ey...
  26. To have a friendship with a guy you could blow enthusiastically once a week seems to ...
  27. I suggested to you that it wasn't necessary to feel unhappy about something you could...
  28. A corrupt newspaper publisher takes up painting Because he wants to depict the nightm...
  29. FIVE OUT OF THE LAST SIX YEARS I'VE lived outside the US, more or less out of a suitc...
  30. In the courtyard was a fountain where you damaged your first watch, bluing it, brainw...
  31. Trust me, this place is going to make your life. The animals don't bite. They just co...
  32. children bark and slide down dirty snow on a warped toboggan that makes the sound of ...
  33. every little while every sugar road every here I go crow spoiled at the touch of the ...
  34. First many people died, and then many other brave people went to save them and they d...
  35. The Head of the company wanted me out. An almost tiny man, he had come to hate excell...
  36. Chose the harbor for its smells- knotted wrack, sea roach, small gull. Stumbled then ...
  37. This wasn't what you had in mind when you said, A house by the sea this flat Japanese...
  38. all the other mornings of your life passed in slow motion, & like an angel with steel...
  39. You are not bucolic and must be dragged to your mother's gate. It flushes you over gr...
  40. You can enter this place I call home at your peril. I don't have much to offer you bu...
  41. Across the Millennium: The Persistence of John Ashbery WAKEFULNESS. John Ashbery. New...
  42. USA USA USA!!! spray painted on the cracked macadam a dry branch blows past empty pap...
  43. Constancy, anguish. Under the old blue dome. A garden for the fleeting marks the dead...
  44. The value of property keeps rising. It seems like you could buy a piece of land & sel...
  45. Isn't the story better embellished? Aren't we happier wooded and beached, burnished w...
  46. There's nothing more you can learn from pain, but here it comes again-with its monoto...
  47. From time to time the propers come. They sleep in every bed, eat bacon & butter on ve...
  48. You have no roof. Someone calls you from the shelterdeck to deliver the bad news. The...
  49. We suspend disbelief until the incubation period is over & we can stand on the street...
  50. Standing behind glass, Paula & I watched the light checker the bay. It was the armist...
  51. They slept and ate, like us. Feral they were not. The intricacy of their handiwork be...
  52. A HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH TEACHER HAD ASSIGNED DYLAN THOMAS'S villanelle "Do Not Go Gentl...
  53. Because there's a word, there's a way to wonder if any of our group shagging baseball...
  54. Political terror confronted every person in Poland under the communist system. But wh...
  55. for Thomas Lux We know he's out there, swimming slowly, searching for corners in the ...
  56. I once watched some pigs eat another pig who had died. They just ate him. I was twelv...
  57. In Rosemary Clooney's obituary there is a reference to her big hit Come-on-a-My-House...
  58. A Special Apz Supplement Please remember the trees on this winter night before it's t...
  59. There's a fire in the vestry beyond hope. Don't leave the .boat, the sergeant said. W...
  60. It's worth a detour to the Villa of the Mysteries. Here they found a man near the bas...
  61. It was only when I was alone that I could write something she would understand in wor...
  62. My father shifted in his chair and turned the page. he was reading the diary of a cal...
  63. I slum among crumbs, a spotted shadow before I become a surrogate republic for you: O...
  64. EMILY DICKINSON WROTE "I HEARD A FLY buzz - when I died" during The Civil War-in 1863...
  65. You imagined all your walls outfitted in leopard skin. This is what I call hiding in ...
  66. This person to whom I was speaking had said one thing But had meant something else An...
  67. Call it what you will. It isn't what it used to be- or, what it never was- once they ...
  68. I have to bother you with a story about how it feels when the dead talk to me. I want...
  69. Think about what you would do when you are handcuffed out of nowhere in the middle of...
  70. JEAN COCTEAU (1889-1963) WAS AMONG THE most versatile, talented, and prolific figures...
  71. I did not speak in secret, At a site in a land of darkness; I did not say to the stoc...
  72. In the middle of the noisy cafe, hunched over a table, sits an old man, a newspaper i...
  73. Tell me where in what penultimate white World do you imagine you can be quit Of these...
  74. Every so often some poet comes up with the idea to write a poem a day for a year. It'...
  75. What girl wouldn't want to get a letter from the lover who had humiliated her in the ...
  76. And the red. Then the red that would fit around the blue. And the blue into the red. ...
  77. PSYCHOANALYTIC OBSERVATIONS AND THEOries are based on clinical work with patients. Ps...
  78. The god-leash leaves Its lashes on the broad bunched backs Of sacrificial animals. Th...
  79. my dad's going to give me a self back. I've made an altar called "the altar for heali...
  80. translated, from the French, by Charles Guenther A Special APz Supplement I Angel Heu...
  81. It was like waking up one day and no longer being able to carry a tune. The little ch...
  82. In a rare moment of repose, Achilles sat on a boulder. he was sweating, but we all we...
  83. One day when our sun runs out of fuel and collapses inward under its own weight, then...
  84. The ocean drifted about their legs as they put masks on their faces and sucked air on...
  85. The bodies are gorgeous in their deposition, mesomorphs in a futile struggle to gain ...
  86. A child's running hard toward the height of a man, running, picking up shiny objects ...
  87. For two dollars you could run, your hands through her hair. That's what the cardboard...
  88. APz In the Studio I WRITE IN THE SOUTHWEST CORNER OF OUR MASter bedroom. It is, as th...
  89. I never held an egg! I threw it away. Wait, that's crazy! Don't go-I held it. I held ...
  90. These rocks are poking out into the sea. What shall we call them? Sedimentary onions ...
  91. the invisible bodies rising from the ground. How slowly they lift themselves at first...
  92. JAN GARDEN CASTRO: Your first books included poems, an edited collection Outcroppings...
  93. Without caution, without pity, without shame they built thick and high walls around m...
  94. History is not continuous-the divorce must occur there was no moment of charity. I st...
  95. A physicist proposes time does not exist, only an infinite number of dramas, grand or...
  96. She was the only one in love forever sitting in uncommon simplicity among the roses W...
  97. "What is the purpose of your poems?" I'm glad you asked me that as I stand here in Mr...
  98. I returned from somewhere no one knew where all of my children their porcelain faces ...
  99. A Special APz Supplement Salesman MY ORDINARY RESPONSE TO TELEMARKETing is like every...
  100. 1. Listening I was falling asleep, wondering how to describe the poet's studio, when ...
  101. Cynthia was feeling sinful in Cincinnati. She had changed her name once, which was a ...
  102. I'm hiding at my table trying to earn the truth to justify the suicides of other open...
  103. Ignorance disguises itself as austerity and piety and always has since the first pers...
  104. I'm up early listening to the hidden birds, Their choir of trills and riffs, and it's...
  105. She found herself caught between life and the glistening black death which was beauty...
  106. In New York we defy everything but gravity but we're not sinking unlike Venice we're ...
  107. When you can't wait for things to be over you yearn for renewal. Yesterday she though...
  108. Torn open by us ever and again, the god is the place that heals. -Rilke, Sonnets to O...
  109. At midnight it began the trains stopped Mike Quill the head of the transit workers un...
  110. Poets fill pages.1 Thoughts fill minds.2 Lucky for us, snow melts in spring,3 and tra...
  111. For reasons unclear, and in circumstances unknown, the Ideal ceased to be content wit...
  112. an airport by matchlight no usual links how lovely the clouds in the form of unsayabi...
  113. Far are the moons of Jupiter-yet how much farther The distance from the boy's bedroom...
  114. "She was as beautiful as six almonds."-David Shapiro She was as lovely as six almonds...
  115. And so it was, in such a way, like aging into my days I had come to resemble the dead...
  116. Someone is breathing into the air inhaling lilacs I steal the first touch of a soundl...
  117. An unmarriage is not a sweater half unraveled or sheared in two not half of anything ...
  118. So we yield convinced We're still resisting. Feeble light, shorn of love, Coats the d...
  119. She leans over the felt, her pelvis grazing the sheened maple rubbed to a gloss by th...
  120. Last night sound left Pulling tissue paper out of an empty gun Last night at the end ...
  121. I, too,2 fell into that art from this desire3 to be the World Honored One,4 not knowi...
  122. The pines rub their great noise into the spangled dark. They scratch their itchy boug...
  123. -for H.T. A student asked the visiting poet: "So, what do I do once I get my degree? ...
  124. It was the winter we ate a lot of oatmeal to stay warm. We lived on 17th and G street...
  125. People are predators They can smell mother-love on you just like animals & they keep ...
  126. Although martyrdom seemed like a bad idea it was the only thing that worked Pure love...
  127. Think of the interview with Meno's slave, who gave answers clearly never learned in t...
  128. This house is a hotel and I live in the back room. I keep a loaded gun in my underwea...
  129. I am still asleep, while certain facts are already taking place. The window is whiten...
  130. Books in a box marked FREE on a Brooklyn stoop; last chance for them to suggest their...
  131. What's going on in the Village? Everyone's limping on their right foot. Why isn't it ...
  132. The Poetics of Extreme Engagement Tom Sleigh, Far Side of the Earth. Houghton Mifflin...
  133. Weekly World News In a photo leaked by the Pentagon, the little mutant wears crossed ...
  134. Don't bet on a team on a losing streak, Don't get ahead at others' expense, In affair...
  135. I wake up to the fact of bicycle tires in the rainy streets of an Asian city, where I...
  136. Only an All-Powerful Name invoked again and again gives me victory over middle age, a...
  137. THERE'S AN ODE TO MEMORY IN ROBERT PINSKY'S latest book, Jersey Rain, that harkens ba...
  138. There is a street in Firenze, a real street--Via Costa San Giorgio--that is built lik...
  139. --for Robert Philen You are like me, you will die too, but not today: you, incommensu...
  140. Mixed metaphors are not necessarily. A bird's eye view or a back seat, the acta diurn...
  141. three poems They tell you, We can't tell you what your child will be ever like and th...
  142. An evening croaking with frogs pleases my heart and the trees drooping over us, the b...
  143. Six or eight asses in khaki or black, across the bar at the kitchen, waiting for tray...
  144. An overturned behind the garage wheelbarrow bearing sleep fell asleep in an overgrown...
  145. There are no magical dwarfs at all, God, how can I fall asleep tonight when darkness ...
  146. Leads from the jailhouse to the superhighway With corrections happening along the fac...
  147. You know how it is: it is late afternoon and you suddenly find yourself in the dreadf...
  148. In the nursery the walls are bare and cracked to half split open. The rocking chair h...
  149. A panting train stops at the station. We step down the train and head straight across...
  150. from Agony: A Proposal There is an us, for the most part. There is not so much an I, ...
  151. I had a very wonderful yellow cover copy of Pasternak's I REMEMBER--there is a small ...
  152. I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. The b...
  153. I am not allowed to write about you in my own words. My mother wouldn't be able to pr...
  154. two poems --for Bo You saved my life. As surely as if you had talked me down from a l...
  155. The first thing you have to do is, you have to be invisible. That's not so easy. Part...
  156. To Jerzy Reitman A square of a house is too tight for us. Every street ends with an e...
  157. The huts reel like lunatics and run in panic, in swirls of dust down the street towar...
  158. The Lord ordered us to walk a difficult road-- the most thorny road of all for ancien...
  159. two poems Beauty doesn't only reside in bodies but bodies present the strongest evide...
  160. Variant of "A Lady with Pearls, to a Blood Red Rook from Turkey, Who Has Depicted Her...
  161. At nightfall a carriage stands still. Wheel spokes dream. A horse draws into his nost...
  162. They open of their own will to the place Where Piracy comes with a falcon's face The ...
  163. Why do you have springs that I won't forget? Why do you have fragrant, mountain summe...
  164. She smirks, sets herself up on a cinder cone--How does it feel, she asks the old moun...
  165. We dropped our priestly robes and put out altar lights. We hid the Lord's Word in boo...
  166. Me and my sidekick, we're both pederasts. Like you. We're both in love with the girls...
  167. Variants The Poems of Marianne Moore includes many of the poet's variants, for change...
  168. two poems Mine is a dry tree. The sons of aliens want me. They have a need. We all ha...
  169. Fruit of the passion flower in a secret room. It has been a long time since a theory ...
  170. Mother, you never laugh, your hands are chapped, frostbitten red and, still, you have...
  171. It is sad and gray in these narrow streets-- girls are sick, boys pale. They toil in ...
  172. In the Studio COMPOSITION BY EAR, BY EYE. THE LOCAL! THE page. The word as locale. Th...
  173. three poems You are often hunched over in an armchair to confide sweet nothings to th...
  174. MAURYCY (MOSZE) SZYMEL WAS BORN INTO a Jewish community in Lvov in 1903. He graduated...
  175. Variant of "It Makes No Difference to Balbus Whether He Drinks Wine or Water.": Cop...
  176. two poems In a white stretch limo, even a visiting writer with a gold tooth and black...
  177. The great urinator was yellow and the stream that came down was bronze-colored rain o...
  178. The police asked me where I was on the night of Sept. 25th. I asked them what day of ...
  179. Within my view, ten thousand churlish dogs Not one well-groomed, not one apt to serve...
  180. "Sir," said self or soul, inattentively, "How meaningless these poems seem." To which...
  181. Consider clear water, untinctured, Transparent to its unseen depths. Consider, then, ...
  182. three poems Now it is time for the scratch ticket to bruise the inner wishes of singl...
  183. I declare myself guilty of not having made, with these hands they gave me, a broom. W...
  184. "I say you are about to hear an authentic poet, one who has forged himself in a world...
  185. I promised myself no more villages, no star, not a picket or door, and no investment ...
  186. eight poems and an interview A Special APZ Supplement It is the springtime of the yea...
  187. First rule: when that mountain ghost confronts you, Allow yourself-and him-no sign of...
  188. five poems I started in the sky and went to water once I reached water I began workin...
  189. So now let them leave me in peace. Now let them get on without me. I am going to clos...
  190. IT'S A ROOM MUCH LONGER THAN IT IS WIDE, extending from the courtyard of our partly g...
  191. After he died she started letting the dog sleep on his side of the bed, the big bed t...
  192. Mrs. Nesbit's ancient bulldog, Pepper, died in the middle of the night. She called an...
  193. Here dwells one who multiplies on living air; His single room is home to none among t...
  194. LAURENCE LIEBERMAN'S recent books of poetry include Flight from the Mother Stone (Uni...
  195. She is thinking that something must have happened in the unraveling of her life, even...
  196. The day comes in on its rock-bed from nine to five and each man is at his work, as if...
  197. The day makes its final appearance, the sky rubbed out in places with a blue so under...
  198. ETHEL RACKIN earned her MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard...
  199. Whisper through the cracked ear of a river Unsteadily I will return in my charcoal sh...