To A Story
The Last Troubadour
We’d become friends after I rented the empty studio
behind her redwood house in Tiburon
As soon as she asked if I was good with my hands
I understood she had a few things
Poems
The One Who Should Write My Elegy Is Dead
The Last Troubadour
The one who should write my elegy is dead
When we made that bet he said most likely
I’d be the loser writing his elegy instead
Nothing is as beautiful as nothing he once said
Alexander Blok
The Last Troubadour
One snowy night I was smiled upon by Russian gods
& found myself at dinner opposite
The Moscow scholars a married couple—he only
the world’s authority on Pasternak
& she the final word on her beloved Alexandr Blok
& as we talked the evening gathered
Hot Night In Akron
The Last Troubadour
My downstairs neighbors were out for the night
seeing The Clash in Cleveland
Which meant it was ok for Jolene to practice her
flamenco routine on my linoleum
Hungry Ghost
The Auroras
Was a man & not a drug
The degradation was the same
The same wasting of the flesh
The same tapped-out well emptied
From A Bridge
The Auroras
I saw my mother standing there below me
On the narrow bank just looking out over the river
Looking at something just beyond the taut middle rope
Of the braided swirling currents
In The High Country
The Auroras
Some days I am happy to be no one
The shifting grasses
In the May winds are miraculous enough
As they ripple through the meadow of lupine
The field as iridescent as a Renaissance heaven
& do you see that boy with his arms raised
Guitar
The Shore
I have always loved the word guitar.
I have no memories of my father on the patio
At dusk, strumming a Spanish tune,
Or my mother draped in that fawn wicker chair
Polishing her flute;