The Bard in Retail

For my terrible eyesight, horn-rimmed spectacles.

One of my fellow-workers is an old homosexual who works hard and wears bracelets with jewels.

Just before the poem was published in the New Yorker, editors were worried the poem's precise detail might create problems for Reece's former colleague. "I called Ralph. He loved it. 'That's great!' he said. Later he was handing out copies, saying, 'I'm the old homosexual!' " The job put Reece back on his feet, but it also showed him he needed to keep moving.

"One day some family friends came into the Mall of America," Reece says, recalling a chance encounter in 1998. "They said to me, 'What happened? What went wrong?' " He had to get away, or forever have to explain himself. He asked for a transfer to Florida. The Palm Beach store had an opening.

He sold his books, again, to raise cash. This time he sold his winter clothes, too. He sold several framed letters he'd received from James Merrill, the poet, and Annie Dillard, the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoirist who had taught him creative writing at Wesleyan.

He bought a one-way plane ticket. In the mall, of course.

He settled in Lantana.

it is not Paris it is not Florence

but it has majesty in its anonymity

this town where people stop for gas

"Florida was liberating. It was whimsical. It was like a new frontier," he said. "Everybody's got a past.

"Everybody's starting over."

Florida can seem so empty on a hot day -- everyone shut away in air-conditioned cars and outlet malls -- but for Reece it was the "weather of poetry."

He wrote that line in a seven-part poem called "Florida Ghazals." In it he weaves strands of his past life (the slaying of his cousin, for example) and the life he was beginning to create. It's mesmerizing.

When I come out at last from the dark I am committed.

I press my fingers on the keys. There are no more locked wards.

The Palm Beach store closed and when it did he salvaged an IBM Selectric typewriter. He wrote while working at Ralph Lauren and at a high-end jewelry store. He kept writing when he moved two years ago to the Brooks Brothers location in Palm Beach Gardens.

He wrote about Bethesda-by-the-Sea, the Episcopal church in Palm Beach.

The ministers attend to the living, inserting wafers like coins dropped into slot machines.

He wrote about a prison escapee who padded himself with Playboy magazines before scaling the razor wire.

Juan sinks into the swamp thick with processed excrement.

Nude paper ladies sink him like cement, silencing him.