got to pay your dues if you want to sing the blues –Ringo Starr I’m melancholy enough to sing the blues. There’s surely no shortage of...

The carnation I left you was given with much pondering – not as romantic, they’ll say, as its more beloved, historic rival, the rose; not...

We sat at the beach together but I didn’t write a thing. I looked to the horizon and its meeting of sky and sea and the cerulean they...

And there he is again, on the very first page of every Merriam-Webster, the top of the list of Animalia, the Everest of his kind; Aaron,...

On our anniversary, we spend the evening gazing at the stars yet not as lovers do, making wishes on ones that fall, but imagining instead...

As a boy, I saw only sand and sea and stones I pitched with a splash beneath the shifting animal clouds that I envisioned. As a single...

Upon our awakening, you ask why men want sex first thing in the morning. It was merely a kiss on your arm. You read a tad too much into...

lays down tracks like he did when he was a kid, predating The Neighborhood of Make Believe— he was already in college by then, getting...

The temperature in our apartment is always moderate, 20 Celsius, or as our friends in San Francisco call it, 68,       never too frigid,...

That page at the end of my notebook, the one that is blank, is the best poem of mine you’ve ever read, you say to me as I choose which to...

—for a sculpture by Walter Allward In the hours after dusk, we deduce he plots the path of distant suns, waits unabatedly for Antares to...

We drive to the beach the day you’re released from the hospital, the pills afloat in your glass currently a memory taken by tides;   and...

After you left, I carved our initials into the stump of a fallen tree. I tallied its age before death, thought of its stunted remnant as...

It is colder than before, the other night I complained of chills, and frost embossed on windowpanes; that which they call cancer eating...

La pomme de terre, the potato, the earth apple, its womb a warmth of ground, unable to tempt the eyes of unfallen man. The apple, la...

You’ve stopped coming over of late, sensing I’ve crossed some sort of line, saying you want to preserve our friendship, this affection of...

Christmas with an ex-lover is spent whenever there’s time to spare, so today I invited you over, with the promise of friendship and...

My composition of song, for you, has been rejected, not because the sentiments were bad, or the structure of verse and chorus, but that I...

Tonight I will ask you to marry me. You will surely say I am mad, in the British sense of the word, and then laugh off my promise to love...

My daughter, all of six and bursting with a Big Bang sort of energy, zigzags across our fenced backyard, picking dandelions she holds in...