- Bad Uncle
He was the last cowboy in Massachusetts,stabling the palomino in his mother’s garage,
buying a saddlery on Route 3Awhen no one in fifty miles listened to country.
He slouched through our childhood,driving a tractor-trailer to the front door,
tooling around for a week in our push-button Chevy,pedal to the floor to “burn out the sin.”
Later he bought a sand farm west of Tucsonand lived in a menagerie of wounds.
His gray wheezing cat looked stuffed—a dog with a confidence problem, perhaps.
From him I learned pornographyand the silence of the straight razor. [End Page 203]
William Logan’s books of poetry include Rift of Light (Penguin, 2017) and Madame X (Penguin, 2012). His numerous books of criticism include Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue (Columbia, 2009). He is a regular critic for the New York Times Book Review and the New Criterion. He is Alumni/ae Professor of English at the University of Florida.