On having his testimony discounted in court: “How can a poet or fiction writer tell the truth in court if he or she can't present the events in a meaningful sequence, which is what a story is? The message is, Stay out of court.”

Eighteen years ago my cousin Arthur
   died alone in a hotel
         in Perugia,

Belle. As a boy of eight he thought of a bell,
something that rang, like the little crystal bell
on the antique table beside the bed that Mother

One boy was hard-of-hearing,
red-haired, freckled, never smiled,
another wore a white bib,

The light sifts down from the naked bulb
he’s quickened with a string. He speaks
to no one out of the well of his anger.

Between the freeway
               and the gray conning towers
of the ballpark, miles

So many poems begin where they
should end, and never end.
Mine never end, they run on

The last words the sea spoke
before it died, the last sigh
of the great wind that blew

Someone enters your life
on a day you no longer
remember. The years pass,

It’s morning; you are six 
Impatient to be off 
In the clear cold light 

The Doctor fingers my bruise. 
“Magnificent,” he says, “black 
at the edges and purple 

Unknown faces in the street
and winter coming on. I
stand in the last moments of

We planted it in May of thirty-three.
Strange times for us. How could a child explain
The helpless eagle on the ice-box door,

He fears the tiger standing in the way.
The tiger takes its time, it smiles and growls.
Like moons, the two blank eyes tug at his bowels.