Stories Collection

  1. The car you were driving flew off the bridge, it was drowning. This was after The Wil...
  2. AT ONE POINT OR ANOTHER, MANY OF US have been stumped by the Zen koan that ends with ...
  3. Picked up, a hermit crab who seems to curl up in a dead snail's shell from cowardice,...
  4. I carry the prints of a hundred thousand strangers in my hands, their palms on the tu...
  5. -But I am "alive"! It's the same material, but lighter, summer stuff, star-coil, Akhm...
  6. What is the origin of this despair I feel When I feel I've lost my grip, can't manage...
  7. Payne Stewart, I remember courtesy of TV how you nearly burst in boyish joy when you ...
  8. Behind profaned walls, calm rituals of exile. The Brazilian cleaner hums and sponges ...
  9. The hedge must have seemed as ever, seeds and yew berries secreted beneath, small edi...
  10. Under the ruins, a steel Mirror. Beneath the mirror, An inscription of absences: anna...
  11. The broken glass on the stairs shines in the electric light. Whoever dropped the beer...
  12. What if the dead came back not only In the shape of your skull your mouth your hands ...
  13. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. -Alber...
  14. I have heard of Black Irish but I never Heard of White Catholic or White Jew. I have ...
  15. One tries to be sober and respectable so as not to be committed as insane - by the ex...
  16. My Poem "Louie Louie" APR's invitation to write about one of my recent poems gives me...
  17. In fall and whiskey weather when the eye clears with the air and blood comes up to th...
  18. The femurs jangling from a mechanic's pulley In the back field The memory of men slau...
  19. This is the time of night at the delicatessen when the manager is balancing a nearly ...
  20. She just shot him, in the Daily News, and who can blame her? He, a sitting cop, and s...
  21. The skull, when it's not whistling like a kettle, is stocking up on unshelved tremors...
  22. ANTONIN ARTAUD IS ONE OF THE GREATEST EXAMPLES IN ART OF THE imaginative retrieval of...
  23. The father was a carrier He had five buckets How did he carry it all in those five bu...
  24. Chance led me that morning to a secluded gallery. Certainly I was glad to be dead. It...
  25. It was euphoria little veins of it sent burst to the brain three little fireworks whi...
  26. You write things down in your sleep you can't remember when you wake up, casting off ...
  27. The child copies out colorless fractions then in the glacial silence of an occidental...
  28. As the century began they were there darting cruel smiles between whitewashed walls b...
  29. The iron turns grayish-white the blacksmith thinks if the wheel disappears I will kno...
  30. EVER SINCE 1962, THE YEAR MY FAMILY MOVED into a Greek Revival farmhouse at a country...
  31. 1 I In autumn, on the train to Pennsylvania, he placed his book face-down on the sunl...
  32. They were talking about pretended love at the old table riddled with worms the fire w...
  33. The old incendiary has met the young one they catch sight of each other in the mirror...
  34. In hissing skirts of stiff silk the good friends agree that fine underthings fail jus...
  35. Sulfurous, Mrs. Hanratty's apron floats above the sunset, auguring extreme cold. The ...
  36. That meant that these cocktails became more and more pointed at the situation of the ...
  37. One can see pale figures next to ancient houses a soldier from long ago a borrowed wo...
  38. There was snow on the apples somewhere. You're at home, it's getting dark out, rain m...
  39. It's the durable quality the hands feel for in the cloth the tight stiffness that for...
  40. Patched with color the animals stood at the gates of fields by flowers bowing in the ...
  41. Almost a woman a girl was washing clothes all lace and open-work in the stream that w...
  42. In a country in Asia once a year they have a holiday for the dogs put wreaths of flow...
  43. Sweet food, I lap you up as from a vessel of kindness. We "unpack" paradigms of unstr...
  44. Wearing oneself out looking for the secret of death takes up the time among the flowe...
  45. I enjoy biographies and bibliographies, and cultural studies. As for music, my tastes...
  46. It is not always easy to confront the animal even if he looks at you without agitatio...
  47. Carefully re-tying a worn gray shoelace under the sign turning green a man has redisc...
  48. This drum beating in a gray-green garden and the child patiently playing close to dea...
  49. The metal melts to marry the air and consolation forsakes a man stroking the neck of ...
  50. At what sounded like a knock one takes the lamp and opens the door to discover only t...
  51. I do not want it the witchcraft song of the yellow bird, nor this room of whisperings...
  52. I MADE ACQUAINTANCE, ON THIS JOURNEY, WITH, a mild and modest young Quaker, who opene...
  53. In a great body of light one saw men arguing in the grip of terrible fear others were...
  54. They have broken the jar with the bets in it for the small lottery somebody won a flo...
  55. A patient stares for a long time at a drop of water that holds the reflection of a di...
  56. One evening stepping barefoot on a nail falling out of a tree swallowing water that i...
  57. Toward the end of a long journey I had abandoned my car, thinking it could not get me...
  58. When he had time the saddle-maker turned barber gave shaves ..... everything in him a...
  59. Crows above the plain expect to find something to eat shadows and plays of light diss...
  60. JANE KENYON DIED OF LEUKEMIA AT 7:57 IN the morning, 22 April 1995. My wife was forty...
  61. I was making a roast. The smell wafted from the kitchen into the living room, through...
  62. Shifting, too anxious to be fully aware, the screen of dirt and glitter grazes the ed...
  63. In the year eighteen twelve in Russia when the soldiers were retreating among the cor...
  64. "So they say: 'This is what happened'; but they do not say what the person was like t...
  65. Are these days made for our commentaries when the wind is uprooting the trees on the ...
  66. The stuffer was sitting before the red breasts the green or mauve wings of his perchi...
  67. Looking at his thoroughbred's hoofmark the horseman could read in that rounded impres...
  68. This autumn wind is so strong the schoolmaster gets the students out of the building ...
  69. with homage to the art of Ruben Trejo and Ray Martin Abeyta The man with the guitar s...
  70. Without fear, this one nails that one puts together while a third sets in place; one ...
  71. Tintoretto painted his dead daughter in the distance carriages were passing the paint...
  72. I stood in line with my friend until that was wrong. The guard said punch in by phone...
  73. The white sun of gardens warms the invalids high and dense a hedge hides the place of...
  74. A last spark climbs from the smithy the objects rest in their great leisure and all t...
  75. Safe and sound the forgotten fish are there in the murky pond hidden by shades the do...
  76. The sign is in place over a door where the dog scratches and the man is asleep. He sa...
  77. On the farm in its full color it is on a day of bright sunlight that one awaits the s...
  78. When it was time to weigh the plucked fowl voices consulted the scales that could not...
  79. One man was listening to the objection of another who declared that his soul was immo...
  80. The landscape does not move the language of men changes for the worse one in a stiff ...
  81. The insect too wants to protect its dwellings it climbs the hill not a word comes fro...
  82. Like the low Shaker cradle sized for a diminished adult in which they rocked their el...
  83. Parts of the fortified city fall into neglect a man stops startled at the sound of a ...
  84. The day is at its height when the apprentice calls pointing at the sky look madame ea...
  85. She is still knitting even as her mind drops a stitch every few seconds. She rips out...
  86. I was taunted for wearing a dark woolen suit to the occasion, or "affair," though mos...
  87. The man hears the clock with the black numbers by the folds of the swaying curtain an...
  88. A piece of red meat is boiling on top of the heart-shaped stove a bit of gold is stil...
  89. With his great stride proud as always the friend hammers the long sidewalks of a fore...
  90. A traitor's old dagger out of a melodrama was found by a gloved hand pulling up nettl...
  91. Around them and on the table where the soup slowly cools things appear to be harmless...
  92. The glovers work the skin of virgin kids for those who part the branches at night bre...
  93. One sees box leaves around the frozen garden bed. The lions are only in the psalms wh...
  94. Two shoes make a difference to the man in the street. The"detention of the Magna Cart...
  95. When the evening launches its mass of clouds one sees the weed-fire send up its smoke...
  96. Unable to imitate the bird the rag hangs from the branch red beside the sweet apple w...
  97. At a fair they simply displayed the long-armed monster slow and short of breath. In a...
  98. I ONCE MADE A PILGRIMAGE TO EAGLE POND FARM in New Hampshire, which from Donald Hall'...
  99. The inhabitant gone the worn spade and the rake with teeth missing will go down the l...
  100. From that bare room with its moldings turning silver a voice came praising smooth hai...
  101. All its windows dark its roofs glistening with rain in a foreign town the admiralty s...
  102. The woman washing herself watched the yoked team no grove could have kept her skin fr...
  103. At the window a rose the colors of a blonde's young nipple a mole walks underground. ...
  104. for Kriste Grubbs at UIU She used to work down in the copy center, and, don't get her...
  105. There are olives that taste like lemons because the Romans' lemon groves are as perma...
  106. Let me sleep & then waken whenever life demands. Let the dead baker of pies advise me...
  107. If seen objectively the cure might look like this this altogether too bright day in l...
  108. (that's what it does, it does what you do) Thus we unfolded our chairs and plainly sa...
  109. Yellow nails fall from the black night sky. Then milk collects in the nettles. Joe wi...
  110. For so many of those dead so recently .:.'."' the air must seem a terrible substance ...
  111. The men helped clear the enemy out of Bussy Farm, advanced toward Ripont, and were m ...
  112. In the school for mischievous wills a boy is dead tonight dead of drugs & drunken dan...
  113. I. IN CAMERA LUCIDA, ROLAND BARTHES' REFLECtion on the relationship between photograp...
  114. -for Cynthia Hunter The wet polish of horizon rising like a water line in the porcela...
  115. "I am gone into the fields" just as it was reported once on a sign one Percy Bysshe S...
  116. In the calendared world opening all too rapidly now to sadness it happens that when t...
  117. five poems New York City, 1915. James Reese Europe, bandleader. You can't accuse this...
  118. Victory Parade, New York City, February 7919. We trained in the streets: the streets ...
  119. nine poems Each green leaf on the gingko tree is caked like a tongue with the flash m...
  120. "How do you like my work?" no writer asks a writer, as mothers never ask mothers, "Ho...
  121. ten poems Pressure of what you'd hear if you really heard the findable pressures of f...
  122. Reading a used book on evolution I wonder about fingerprints, how long they live. Wer...
  123. Dried dark leaves of moxa mixed with gunpowder. The monk lights a braid of six centim...
  124. The broken chalk of lightning across the thrashing trees makes a saliva of the rain f...
  125. 1. It wasn't suffering exactly, no, not quite vulnerability- more the registering on ...
  126. In that first harsh winter of the war I dreamt a great pear of a man, sun ripened in ...
  127. three poems (scree was) (the pushed in knitted back) (pull-string what's that tight) ...
  128. The screen is full of voices, all of them holding their tongues. Certain things have ...
  129. Fuck's okay unless you plan to send your manuscript to _____ at _____ _____ _____, bu...
  130. 1 WE WERE STAYING WITH MY WIFE'S French-Canadian cousin and his lady friend Ros at th...
  131. An avalanche of missing concepts one is Tempted (to call them beautifully truant) To ...
  132. three poems At twenty-two when I got drafted, smoked home-rolleds, drank and drove, I...
  133. She stood cold and straight in a red circle of anthills. The garments floating under ...
  134. Because a window is always relative to a body, and the body is never repeated. Thus p...
  135. A MORNING NEARLY TWENTY YEARS AGO: a day early in the already-warm Arizona spring whe...
  136. two poems It's a tempting thought- and quick to practice. It was always that thought ...
  137. I rose from the cold bottom of the pond with other bodies like broken columns of numb...
  138. four poems We say, "There's a person turning in the window"-very small, very precise,...
  139. Don't waste your time talking normally to people who aren't normal, TH offered, so I ...
  140. The tongue is a smudge in the mouth and yellow leaves are blown all around the names ...
  141. Big fool, my ancestors understood we live in two societies: time and that other socie...
  142. It wasn't all smell of Adirondack lilac and flowering chestnut trees along Broadway i...
  143. translated, from the Russian, and with an introduction by Mark Halperin and Dinara Ge...
  144. He could never tell the same story, the same way no matter what history remembers no ...
  145. I hear even now the enormous sigh exhaled From human emergency when Darwin demonstrat...
  146. What can I say? It was France. Little, stupid France. I was a week there in the boxin...
  147. HE DOES NOT MEET HIM. Living alone in March 1970 (with never-healing wounds) on Avenu...
  148. If the heavens were paper. If the forest were pens. If buildings were lamps. And ocea...
  149. These barrier islands Are bodies of the outcast Killed by bridal parties And shrimp b...
  150. i Love for twenty-six years, you can't stop A withered petunia's crisp the bud sticky...
  151. The only man I ever knew who put vinegar in his whiskey was Big Jim Cannizaro that wo...
  152. Andy's war. Even as the bluejays move in Alabama, In Baghdad The camera sees a minare...
  153. I took the funicular to the top, almost. A kind of dying amplification, like evening ...
  154. 1. Change is change. Until I open The curtain I can just imagine A white leaf curled ...
  155. There's a new sound in the cold trees, delicate, deliberate soon water will run down ...
  156. Your hooves drawn together underbelly shoulders in mud your mane of wisp and soil dep...
  157. IN THE CHARACTERS OF MEURSAULT FROM THE Stranger and Dr. Rieux from The Plague, Camus...
  158. Penance of rain, stop me. Invoke me. Hold me at the wet rail. That is just a puddle d...
  159. If she's writing a letter on a sheet of mica to be left on the shelf of the cave with...
  160. At eye-level above the urinal a small printed sign (11-point. Helvetica) on pressure-...
  161. 1 Why does the outstretched finger of home probe the dark hotel room like a flashligh...
  162. Was what that old man had, and he'd had it All his life. What should we think of him?...
  163. The engineer's story of hauling coal to Davenport for the cement factory, sitting on ...
  164. Let's praise loss, its particular weights, its music. Sometimes the broom is brittle;...
  165. It's true. Outrageously plain as day. The world Is full of crazy women, with their wi...
  166. The strangenesses are plenty here-up stalks, roving the water-mashed ground. Crabs & ...
  167. Charmant pays de l'imagination, toi que l'etre bienfaisant par excellence a livre aux...
  168. A Special APz Supplement That's what the lady said. Said it right Out, loud and clear...
  169. It means little to me now when I am rusting away, that at dawn gods still roll out of...
  170. Widows walking. Speaking of two old orchardists at rest at last in the cherry-wood co...
  171. When did you stop telling us what we could believe when did you take that one step on...
  172. I LIVE IN SAN FRANCISCO IN A GATED TWOstory house under a Spanish-American landlord w...
  173. The other time I wore a tie my friend Mark had called me that Berrigan had died and t...
  174. [1] Fargone in the first place: the poet's voice. The poet is abroad on speech, distr...
  175. Two hundred millennia and to set foot out of Africa the first mistake Since then nigh...
  176. So then he wandered out into the street and began to testify Something about life bei...
  177. It does not matter to you what I fail to understand as the light enters the sky you a...
  178. God reels out the temporal bone of a thirty-four thousand-year-old Neandertal. Copy...
  179. The words dappled with sunlight floated across the open field as I drove by. You unde...
  180. The bolls by the side of the road at first this picture of startling cream lies to th...
  181. The harsh cry of a partridge echoes along the valley through the misty rain two month...
  182. Not sleep with its legs and pumping heart but the light around trees the deep silence...
  183. Taste of taste you that know without saying you that also began somewhere in the ligh...
  184. If you can be said to remember and by that I mean if you can be said to remember anyt...
  185. You had nothing you said, Though all of our life You'd reminded me that there is no S...
  186. THE FOLLOWING CONVERSATION TOOK PLACE via e-mail, beginning in September of 2002 and ...
  187. You were a mystery loneliness pursued An alpine lake where no face Had been seen. The...
  188. Finally daisies and tomatoes, I have settled for that and bushes more important than ...
  189. The other side of the reservoir uphill from the tennis court he had to take two stree...
  190. Echoes rebound in the ancient ball court Against the wind singing in the trees There ...
  191. The Mays of Ventadorn THE MAYS OF VENTADORN. W. S. Merwin. Washington: National Geogr...
  192. Brown is invisible. Neither to see nor be seen- minarets like shadow monsters on the ...
  193. There are soldiers in mother's hair and soldiers coming in the window. Distracted? I ...
  194. All night waking to the sound of light rain falling softly through the leaves in the ...
  195. Polishing your eyeglasses, I try them on and watch the nurses hoist you-blind, giggli...
  196. Whatever we say we know there is another language under this one a word of it is alwa...
  197. You are what we believe even if we know better seeing is believing though you write b...
  198. An embarrassment of poverty, we waded into thousands of new volumes, the great-grandc...
  199. I THINK A POEM IS NOT JUST a response to the external world," says poet Henri Cole. "...