August Kleinzahler

This is from Sleeping It Off in Rapid City:

Poetics

I have loved the air outside Shop-Rite Liquor
on summer evenings
better than the Marin hills at dusk
lavender and gold
stretching miles to the sea.

At the junction, up from the synagogue
a weeknight, necessarily
and with my father—
a sale on German beer.

Air full of living dust:
bus exhaust, ariborne grains of pizza crust
wounded crystals
appearing, disappearing
among streetlights and unsuccessful neon.

Kleinzahler is a restless poet, abrupt, opinionated, brilliant. The text of his 2004 pasting of the Garrison Keillor edited Good Poems is here. Do I agree with? Oh, not entirely. It's a powerful piece, though, worth looking at.