Mark Halliday

In the huddle you said "Go long—get open"
and at the snap I took off along the right sideline
and then cut across left in a long arc
and I'm sure I was open at several points—
...

They got old, they got old and died. But first—
okay but first they composed plangent depictions
of how much they lost and how much cared about losing.
...

It would have been dark but not lugubrious. It would have been
fairly short but not slight. It would have contained a child
saying something inadvertently funny that was not said by my daughter,
...

The students eat something and then watch the news,
a little, then go to sleep. When morning breaks in
they find they have not forgotten all: they recall
the speckle of words on certain pages of
...

I remember riding somewhere in a fast car
with my brother and his friend Jack Brooks
and we were listening to Layla & Other Love Songs
...

The connection between divorced fathers and pizza crusts
is understandable. The divorced father does not cook
confidently. He wants his kid to enjoy dinner.
...

Five more books in a box to be carried out to the car;
your office door closes behind you and at that moment
you turn invisible—not even a ghost in that hall
...

Comstock stands in the densely odorous kitchen
sniffing Mrs. Yapp's squab pies. His hunger
makes him wide awake and he can imagine Mrs. Yapp
...

Though it's all too clear how unimpressed you are by a cri de cœur
and wafting away unhugged is from your perspective de rigueur
of schemes to rendezvous with you I'm still a restless entrepreneur
...

I find I am descending in a propeller plane upon Pasco
in the state of Washington. I accept this;
I have reasons for participating in the experiential sequence
...

Like nearly all women under sixty she would have deftly
avoided meeting the eyes of an unknown man—
...

For example, I wrote my first poem in 1976 about being in the Vermont house
after my mother's death; she died the year before;
she loved that house. My father said he kept having moments
...

Sam paused on the stairs. He had forgotten a thing.
In Leland's room a copy of Thomas Merton lay on the floor.
The air was full of gnats of possibility. What was the story?
...

The Holy Ghost was browsing in his or her library
one day in the future, unaccountably bored,
oddly querulous, vaguely wanting something that would be
...

In the last year of my marriage,
among a hundred other symptoms I wrote a poem called
'The Woman across the Shaft'—she was someone
...