Leonard as Anatomist, Repeatedly
To raise the ribs to dilate the chest to expand the lung to indraw the
air to enter the mouth to enter the lung.
Stadia After All
“Dad,” I said, saying so, “Shea Stadium and Yankee Stadium make
two stadia in New York.” (Hell is two dogs fighting over water.)
“No, nope,” he said, saying so, “two stadiums in New York.
Essay on Confessional Poetry: My Eyes Have Seen What My Hand Did
. . . In which the poet recalls one term’s beginnings and proposes a rehabilitation.
What is understood as confessional poetry today does not have much in common with the particular triumphs of its original practitioners.
Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose
Dear Mary (if that is your name),
I bet you’ll be pretty surprised to hear from me. It really is me, by the way,
although I have to confess at the moment that not only can I not seem to keep
your name straight in my head, Laura? Susie? Odile? but I seem to have forgotten
my own name. I plan to keep trying different combinations, Joe loves Lola, Willy
loves Suki, Henry loves you, sweetie, Georgia?, honeypie, darling. Do any of these seem right to you?
Two Shops Dealing in Tie-Dye Fabrics
In a town famous long ago
for its field of irises and its bridge
with seven sections (like a poem!),
and an annual horse market,
Bells in the Endtime of Gyurmey Tsultrim
The bowl made from a tobacco-yellow skull
And the blood of a yearling ox
With seeds of quince floating in it.
Tremendous Vehicles
Mama wants to see something else but you know how blood is, tra-la-la, Mama’s driving us to the country ’cause she thinks we need some staid time, tra-la-la, driving by the rural slaughterhouse, tra-la-la. I’m missing the concrete where I wrote: I love me some concrete; miss the teasing traffic lights: go ahead, stop; tight fit of houses, tessellated apartments, looking in Sra. Guzman’s rooms to tell time from her closer clock.
6:27
When I get time to play, it’s gonna be just you, me, and the Department of Beer.
Amend that: all of the above, all of the above and more beer, and all of the above and the State of Alaska.
Damn right I don’t rightly know what I’m capable of alone and left to my “devices.”
7:13
My name is Shang – or Winter.
So this is peace.
You think, and magically . . . a strawberry appears!
Flotsam vs. the Ulcer Diet
When I began to write, my ideas about narrative were pretty nonexistent. I tried to write prose that was consonant with the work of writers I admired and, later on, tried to extend their techniques when I could. It wasn’t until my first novel was shuttling from trade publisher to trade publisher and later, when the published book was eventually reviewed, that I found out narrative was supposed to be something.
