The first purple wisteria I recall from boyhood hung on a wire outside the windows of the breakfast room next door at the home of Steve Pisaris.

Still sober, César Vallejo comes… around the apartment building cove… He puts down his cane, removes his… to untangle the mess. His neighbor… wondering what’s going on. A middl…

A good man is seized by the police and spirited away. Months later someone brags that he shot him onc… through the back of the head with a Walther 7.65, and his life

Look, the eucalyptus, the Atlas p… the yellowing ash, all the trees are gone, and I was older than all of them. I am older than the m… than the stars that fill my plate,

Early March. The cold beach deserted. My kids home in a bare house, bundled up and listening to rock music pirated from England. My wife

Here in February, the fine dark branches of the almond begin to sprout tiny clusters of leaves, sticky to the touch. Not far off, about the length

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.

First light. This misted field is the world, that man slipping the greased bolt back and forth, that man tunneled with blood

Iron growing in the dark, it dreams all night long and will not work. A flower that hates God, a child tearing at itself, this one

People sit numbly at the counter waiting for breakfast or service. Today it’s Hartford, Connecticut more than twenty-five years after the last death of Wallace Stevens…

He made a line on the blackboard, one bold stroke from right to left diagonally downward and stood back to ask, looking as always at no on… in particular, “What have I done?…

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

Everyone comes back here to die as I will soon. The place feels r… since it’s half dead to begin with… Even on a rare morning of rain, like this morning, with the low sk…

The long lines of diesels groan toward evening carrying off the breath of the living. The face of your house

Everyone loves a story. Let’s beg… We can fill it with careful rooms… with things—tables, chairs,… closed to hide tiny beds where chi… or big drawers that yawn open to r…