a professor adapting Joyce for opera he is mining for music in Ulysses’s cave where the white walls loaded with black English sparkle every now and then, hoisting himself...

      Death Italian Style In Italy when you die People want to know, And even though it's obvious Where the funeral will be They must be told when, So notices are pasted On stone...

      Panoptic Nerve I come from the prison state of the future. When I was growing up people were very worried about crime. The recession and decline of stable employment had led to...

      The curious absence of ducks in paintings by John Constable Were there none, or simply far beneath his notice? Dozens heckle my arrival, note my eagerness to hide. I take a room...

      Birds and Mice There are birds in my garden and they are not singing  for me they are black like my moods and when they are dead they keep making noises there are mice beneath...

      The Borders of a Man My father was a concrete man: welded hard by ash and stone, unfeeling like a rock paperweighted on shores farther than the edges my childhood can remember....

  Yolanda Moon plays again There is this certain lightness in my chest, bright and airy, the black obsidian anvil’s been tweezed out of me through a small hole punched through my chest, just a...

      Crue De La Seine 28 Janvier 1910     The river rising through the old quarries, the underground galleries of golden limestone, signs of the flood on our pediments. A...

      Authority Challenged My dog’s left rear leg shoots  out behind her. She looks up, embarrassed, then does her business as necessary. The ring finger of my left hand twitches...

      Old Haunts What is it with old haunts – you can’t resist? Try as you might to block it out, you are just biding your time, waiting to strike, to steal the apple from the tree,...