Seven months into my 80th birthday
I slip back in time
I’m driving down highway one where
California’s fertile hills wink at me
Poem for My First Love
Revenge
The email was welcomed, when it arrived visibly but silently on the screen of Gilbert Fitzwilliams’ computer, like the first crocus of spring; small, insignificant considered by itself, a minor blessing but one to be cherished nonetheless:
Wide-Eyed to the World
The farmhouse floats, an island in a sea of rape.
From a bus labouring on high roads you gaze down
at a boreen, visible now, snaking through an ocean of amarillo.
Watch What Develops
I have never been to Coney Island
yet the Ferris wheel in sepia-drenched
pictures, the greenish tint of old Polaroids,
Carousel Court by Joe McGinniss Jr.
John Cheever was a surrealist but I think the suburbs made him crazy which allowed him to write they way he did. Raymond Carver presented a sculpted world littered with chiseled drunks, sloppy whores, baby killers, lovesick lovers, unwashed truckers, and belligerent bakers – never mind the loners down to their last bone marrow transplant. I re-read Carver’s Vitamins whenever I get down in the mouth about my fiction and that fills me with hope. I dare add, A.M. Homes is an heir to these suburban chestnuts, a daughter born out the bonfire they created.
Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler
Anne Tyler’s opening line: “Kate Battista was gardening out back when she heard the telephone ring in the kitchen.”