If you were twenty-seven and had done time for beating our ex-wife and had no dreams you remembered in the morning, you might

Something has fallen wordlessly and holds still on the black drive… You find it, like a jewel, among the empty bottles and cans where the dogs toppled the garbage…

Down sat Bud, raised his hands, the Deuces silenced, the lights lowered, and breath gathered for the coming storm. Then nothing… not a single note. Outside starlig…

“Hill of Jews,” says one, named for a cemetery long gone."Hill of Jove," says another, and maybe Jove stalked here

The gates are chained, the barbed-… An iron authority against the snow… And this grey monument to common s… Resists the weather. Fears of idl… Of protest, men in league, and of…

Dawn coming in over the fields of darkness takes me by surprise and I look up from my solitary roa… pleased not to be alone, the birds now choiring from the orange grove…

April, and the last of the plum bl… scatters on the black grass before dawn. The sycamore, the lim… the struck pine inhale the first pale hints of sky.

A man roams the streets with a bas… of freestone peaches hollering, “P… peaches, yellow freestone peaches… My grandfather in his prime could… the Tigers of Wrath or the factor…

When the Lieutenant of the Guardi… heard the automatic go off, he tur… and took the second shot just abov… the sternum, the third tore away the right shoulder of his uniform,

Four bright steel crosses, universal joints, plucked out of the burlap sack — “the heart of the drive train,” the book says. Stars

Three young men in dirty work clot… on their way home or to a bar in the late morning. This is not a photograph, it is a moment in the daily life of the world,

This has nothing to do with war or the end of the world. She dreams there are gray starlings on the winter lawn and the buds of next year’s oranges alongside

In Havana in 1948 I ate fried dog believing it was Peking duck. Lat… in Tampa I bunked with an insane… who kept a .38 Smith and Wesson i… In the same room were twins, oiler…

A child wakens in a cold apartment… The windows are frosted. Outside… words rising from the streets, wor… understand, and then the semis gea… for the traffic light on Houston.…

The day comes slowly in the railya… behind the ice factory. It broods… one cinder after another until eac… glows like lead or the eye of a do… possessed of no inner fire, the br…