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The boats like huge bright birds sail back when someone calls them; the small campers struggle out and climb the hill to lunch. I see the last dawdler vanish in a ridge of trees. The whole valley sighs in the haze and heat of noon. Far out a fish astounds the air, falls back into…

It’s not a month for Republicans, All business, baffled inside their suits The color of moles. The wind Shakes out the blue hair of matrons Who suck their thin cheeks pale as if At the mercy of pigfeet and banjos. I’m confused too but take heart in The first crocus wobbling out Like the precarious…

It didn’t seem like history. Seemed, more expediency. . . . I’m walking to the beauty shop. On Rugby Road a fractured fume of sodden leaf and Phi Delts’ pizza lunch, and through the pane one of their rout, white-coated, hands behind, waits unattending in the wings, waits out the weary midday to the robust…

Self-stranded, in a raw strength Not untested but contained, cornered, He held himself at the poised heat Of that whitening hour when wind stirs, When it licks at his high ledge, laying tribute To the mute opening with a mild motion, Sighing itself through seeds and sweet herbs. For then, as a thirst joined at…

Bound in my car, parallelograms of light shifting in front of me, red      & white, darkness coming on like a sock, the ankle of the day — I notice two skaters out on the perilous river where the ice wrinkles like agony on a face in shock —                  (daring, or indifferent? Their hockey…

Overture. A shutter opens. Down Goes light. The Norfolk Island pine Potted in peatmoss breathes Deeply once; resigns itself on cue. Under the dimming dervish crown Extend now four, no, five fringed limbs (Twelve more hang groundward barely skirting trance) In stills — in stills that — yes! inspired Revolve and quicken. As though fingers…

Lily, krinon, Susannah, Out of night’s stemless convolvulus, Lileia, choice stalk and throated petal, Out of smooth sand and night’s choicest iron. Through his stilled arms poured buried rivers, Down the deposits of his legs bored torrents. Over his hands the hours subdivided Like foam, a century’s sped lilies. And though the dark room held…

     ”It comes back to me.” We say that about remembering, as if from longer ago than we knew we had touch with, from before we were born and in someone else’s life, “An apple fell in the night and a wagon stopped.” We were asleep then and heard neither. She herself was asleep. There had…

Lordliest maple, of the thick-poured trunk, late, later, latest, still to be treasuring so uncountably many leaves — themselves forgetting themselves in a last firebrand fling earthward, down the leaning helix of a standing breeze; to lie among the eagerer fledglings, earlier dead, daffodil to crimson webfeet imprinted on the icehard mud. Each single leaf…