There are four hundred fifty-seven names for heroin. I have learned eighty-two of them. The drug sellers tell me the names, the pushers, the smack heads, the needle-specked little boys pulling their pants down to display their swollen red puds tell me
That night, lying by the fire under a set of stars that looked so fresh and clean they could have been minted that morning, in the chilly air that carried on its sleek back the sounds of nightbirds and the splash of fish —maybe this far south a gator tail —I watched the two of them sitting across from me, as Frank, snugged behind her broad shoulders, combed out Hazel’s hair with slow, gentle strokes.
I was on the back porch washing greens when Harold drove around the side of the house with a stolen canoe on top of the truck and a bushel of oysters in back.
“I thought you were down fishing on the flats,” I said as he came up the steps with the oysters in a sack over his shoulder.
Sometimes you wait a while for the bus—
the bus of happiness
probably—just now passing the fried pie hutch
Sometimes love’s vagrancy (whatever you call it)
overwhelms all but the most robust subscribers,
and, dishonest as it may sound, the whole cramped enterprise
On the pale morning I left town
I was thinking about women,
and later, in the Rockies where work was scarce,
I don’t know what to say to you
and have called you names—mutilator of souls,
warden of dust, evocateur— that only placed me
Yes, I want someone to know me well,
better than the foreman at Ford Electra
knows the chips
Today we are going into shelter,
we are going underground to discover the passage that leads
to the next world. We will be happy there,
or we will not worry about happiness; we will make neat designs