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I am five,      Wading out into the deep            Sunny grass, Unmindful of snakes      & yellowjackets, out            To the yellow flowers Quivering in sluggish heat.      Don't mess with me            'Cause I have my Lone Ranger Six-shooter. I can hurt      You with questions            Like silver bullets. The tall flowers in my dreams are…

Jonathan says our ferry will dock at 1 a.m. At this remote island and remain here For thirty minutes, time enough For a sulphur bath at the hot spring. The gate drops and we run up the landing Toward a shed with a splinter Of applejack-light leaking out Through the darkness around the door. We…

It's their not knowing how they must die. The emptiness of their beautiful eyes. The heat and damp and pulse of their breaths, the way joy seizes them like a miniature death— and no shame in it.

I've bicycled out into the blue fieldlight to glimpse them: a few flecks zigzagging down a hillside. drawn to the lighted compounds igniting at this hour and echoing the sky. Before long they stop, shy of a smell or barbed wire, circling on old pissed-on ground yellowed once more, and wait. Once, as a child…

Sometimes driving home from the library at night I take the long way leading out of town past Buttermilk Road and the paper mill where there is one light on and the nightwatchman between rounds stares through a golden cubicle, his back to the moon rising on summer nights so he can see each vehicle…

Often I miss the old poems, the High Ones: the sober Miltonian cosmosgestalt-explainers, with the lobes of gods like batteries charging the lightningfork and discourse of their iambics; or the stately, convolute Modernist epics taking us by either anthro- and psycho- logical hand through the filedrawered corridors of our learning; or, of course, the anonymous…

My father stands and sways before the mirror, in the blue tiled bathroom, shaving. The wide legs of his boxer shorts empty as windsocks, the neck of his white cotton undershirt fringed with curly black hairs. My mother is asleep. Overnight his shaving brush has stiffened into the shape of a flame. When he swirls…

I don't know if I have lost as much as you but last night I lay awake listening to the pipes purl on and this old house give and wheeze, leaving port for who knows where. You probably know all about lying awake, the recommended counting backwards, the dark which is empty which is forgetting…