The History TeacherTrying to protect his students’ innocencehe told them the Ice Age was really justthe Chilly Age, a period of a million yearswhen everyone had to wear sweaters.And the Stone Age became the Gravel...

though they know in their adult hearts,even as they threaten to banish Timmy to bedfor his appalling behavior,that their bosses are Big Fatty Stupids,their wives are Dopey Dopeheadsand that they themselves are Mr. Sillypants.

a long time ago when cataclysms were commonas sneezes and land masses slidaround the globe looking for placesto settle down and become continents,someone introduced us at a party.

I could feel the day offering itself to me,and I wanted nothing morethan to be in the moment-but which moment?Not that one, or that one, or that one,

The fly lands on the swatter.The movie runs backwardsand catches fire in the projector.This species apes us wellby talking only about itself

all they want to dois tie the poem to a chair with ropeand torture a confession out of it.They begin beating it with a hoseto find out what it really means.

These days every morning begins like a joke you think you have heard before, but there is no one telling it whom you can stop. One day it’s about a cow who walks into a...

But some nights, I must tell you,I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep.I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness.I sing a love song as well as I can,lost for a while...

…(my father) would say nothing,And I could not find a silenceAmong the one hundred Chinese silencesThat would fit the one he createdEven though I was the one Who had just made up the businessOf the...

JapanToday I pass the time readinga favorite haiku,saying the few words over and over.It feels like eatingthe same small, perfect grapeagain and again.I walk through the house reciting itand leave its letters fallingthrough the air...

This is what I think aboutwhen I shovel compostinto a wheelbarrow,and when I fill the long flower boxes,then press into rowsthe limp roots of red impatiens—the instant hand of Deathalways ready to burst forthfrom the...

I love to move like a mouse inside this puzzle for the body, balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.

It seems only yesterday I used to believethere was nothing under my skin but light.If you cut me I could shine.

No one here likes a wet dog.

The whole idea of it makes me feellike I’m coming down with something,something worse than any stomach acheor the headaches I get from reading in bad light–a kind of measles of the spirit,a mumps of...

MarginaliaSometimes the notes are ferocious,skirmishes against the authorraging along the borders of every pagein tiny black script.If I could just get my hands on you,Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,they seem to say,I would bolt the...

Is there a better method of departure by night than this quiet bon voyage with an open book, the sole companion who has come to see you off, to wave you into the dark waters...

When i believe in everything, I could not seethe actors semicircled around a studio microphoneflipping the pages of scripts in unison.I only heard the voices, resonant, electric, adult,accusing each other of murder.

Introduction to PoetryI ask them to take a poemand hold it up to the lightlike a color slideor press an ear against its hive.I say drop a mouse into a poemand watch him probe his...

Picnic, LightningIt is possible to be struck by a meteoror a single-engine planewhile reading in a chair at home.Safes drop from rooftopsand flatten the odd pedestrianmostly within the panels of the comics,but still, we know...

There are easier ways of making sense,the connoisseurship of gesture, for example.You hold a girl’s face in your hands like a vase.You lift a gun from the glove compartmentand toss it out the window into...

I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more light until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs that we follow across a page...

This is the middle. Things have had time to get complicated, messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore… This is the thick of things.So much is crowded into the middle—…too much to name, too much to...

You know the parlor trick.wrap your arms around your own bodyand from the back it looks likesomeone is embracing youher hands grasping your shirther fingernails teasing your neckfrom the front it is another storyyou never...

It is time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it to my chest, life preserver in a sea of unremarkable men and women,...

I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves, Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son, each one stitched...

And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air