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I am almost never standing in the ocean, not that way, not anymore.

She was wanting to be noticed as a person not wanting to be noticed.

He does not dare to ask the question flaring in his head. Will she stay.

I see the garden far away in itself reflected in the polished spade.

After moving, I began to look at the images and piece them together.

The fish’s eye is mangled, tugged inward; blood leaks from its gills.

The Renaissance mastered the illusion of depth on a flat plane.

I’m there inside La Fonda at the bar ordering another glass of red wine!

You think I couldn’t write it because I look like a mechanic, I said.

I didn’t want to start a poem with night where there should be a name.

Why don’t we just get drunk and walk down the middle of Fifth Avenue.

Poetry can open. Is there a case for poetry in this plague year?

Imagine first the mighty blast. And then the mushroom cloud.

We were both up there smoking weed and axle grease, blinded.

We drink to Nixon’s impeachment again, this time with the good stuff.

My mother taught me to rebel within the boundaries of acceptability.

A clandestine participation through a soundless beauty.

Art is a way for the mind to master the body, even if it is not one’s own.

I was nagged by those boxes from my old life stacked in the garage.

What felt like sanctity now felt like nothingness, like death.

He smelled like the bars my mother took me to in the middle of the day.

One makes one’s peace with words in a poem and space in a dream.

Everything is mine on loan: the leaves I’ve combed out of my hands.

“I’m sorry,” I wrote, “but I have to go back to the bookstore.” My only plan was to plead for my old job back. To my surprise, it worked. The law was safe; the law was my father. I decided to go to law school.

It wasn’t the bees I thought to tell but wasps the evening you died.

I used to be known for the humor of my music, the lightness of touch.

James Salter

James Salter

She had boyfriends before she met him. Well, not really boyfriends.