That was the summer I used the Duino Elegies in all of my seductions, taking Rilke from my briefcase the way another man might break out candlelight and wine. I think Rilke would have understood, would have thought the means justified the ends, when I began to read in a voice so low it forced…
Out of the old noon sun still lifting wraiths from morning's gully, the phoebe's call assails the barn— its shingles are nearer the heart of gray in the shadows of those deep eaves. Summer, the huckster, wends over Blinn's Hill, having sold snippets of blue thread, a needle, some ribbon, perhaps a pan…
Yellow fingers lift a match to Virginia's shreds and edges: Deeply I pull smoke in, and blood faints at the door. My young father coughs, gags, and wipes his lips with pale narrow fingers: When he looks at his shaking hands, splaying them out to gaze at them, I understand how much his nails please…
Charles and I go out together in his boat, which is a cat- amaran, in the burnishing weather, elated. so it's not surprising that in his boat, which is a cat at top speed among cats, this poem begins. Elated. so it's not surprising that we sing “Speed Bonnie Boat” to the winds. At top…
but you sent me back to Turkey, and the town was Canakkale, or was it Kusadasi, no, Canakkale with my first sight of a Turkish street, of Turkish women wrapped to their eyes, and on the streets (I was high on a bus on the way to Troy) were all those small “cathedrals,” carried by…
Ben wriggles around, crowding closer. He's cold. More than that, he wants his mother to be awake. He presses against her, feeling for her heartbeat. It's not a beat he can count, separate knocks through her skin. It's more a constant soft rustle, like a mouse scratching around under a pile of dry leaves. There's…
Beautiful beautiful nowhere. Lightly canoeing. Day sultry. Me desultory. Toing and froing testing the bottom for bass, or in fact just yoyoing aimless assortments of ornament up and down. Very encouraging soundtrack, once you get into it. Whole Canadian laid-back percussion section. Woodpecker, marshhen, dittybug, loon, frog. Sidemen, all of them, happy to just hit-it-when-indicated….
Remember when we were introduced to the only man in Oregon who had seen Diomeda cauta, the White-Capped Albatross also known as Shy, whose normal range is deep air deep off the continental shelf, and spoke of the Harlequin Duck, of Histrionicus histrionicus: Rather small, he said; mostly silent. You looked at him strangely. He…
Penn Valley Park, Kansas City, 1936 In bronze you sit, safe now from the obsessions of decline, your pony beneath you, your hand held to your head, you gaze exhausted at the city that has risen against the plain, as if this earth, in unfaithful partnership, had pulled a pistol. After decades of that quick…
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