A blue jay poses on a stake meant to support an apple tree newly planted. A strong wind on this clear cold morning barely ruffles his tail feathers.

In the early morning before the sh… opens, men standing out in the yar… on pine planks over the umber mud. The oil drum, squat, brooding, bri… with metal scraps, three-armed cro…

Hearing of the death of Larry Levis this past May, Jane Cooper, one of my oldest (and surely my dearest) friends in poetry, wrote me a consoling letter, one that...

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,

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 sour daylight cracks through m… “Stephan! Stephan!” The rattling… Comes on a trot, the cold tray in… Toast whitening with oleo, brown t… Yesterday’s napkins, and an opened…

I bend to the ground to catch something whispered, urgent, drifting across the ditches.

19 years old and going nowhere, I got a ride to Bessemer and walk… the night road toward Birmingham passing dark groups of men cursing the end of a week like every week.

Someone was calling someone; now they’ve stopped. Beyond the gl… the rose vines quiver as in a light wind, but there is none: I hear nothing. The moments pass,

Pond snipe, bleached pine, rue wee… I walk by sedge and brown river ro… to where the old lake boats went d… All the ships are gone, the gray w… in upon itself. Even the channel’s

Along the strand stones, busted shells, wood scraps, bottle tops, dimpled and stainless beer cans. Something began here

When Nellie, my old pussy cat, was still in her prime, she would sit behind me as I wrote, and when the line got too long she’d reach

“I’ve been where it hurts.” the K… He becomes Sierra Kid I passed Slimgullion, Morgan Min… Camp Seco, and the rotting Lode. Dark walls of sugar pine —,

Words go on travelling from voice to voice while the phones are stil… and the wires hum in the cold. Now and then dark winter birds settle slowly on the crossbars, where hud…

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