for my Grandmother Nobody troubled you that last night, no one came. No daughter visited whose unrelenting care accused you of your deep need to have her there: child now to your own child, only your needling her (she could do nothing right) kept clenched your pride, yet left you needing her that much more….
The wolf discovers his fur is changing: gone flat now, sleek as sealskin. Once grey, now hazel, his gaze holds past territory, past food to memory and meeting. A giraffe he approaches stares before bolting. Shrills of alarm through the jungle. He deserts the ancestors’ feeding ground. He grazes now, like another, calmer species. At…
Made a fool of. She rose to that. She would not be made a fool of. She looked down at the tennis court. She couldn't hear any of their noises through the window. The girl was good, played like a man, concentrating, sweating. Coiled for her backhand. Whipped it across with top spin. He had…
At first you will know her as yours only by a vague contrariness That characterizes everyone else you love, among others you and myself. You will see in her your marriage — that is there will be more Of her mother than you thought you bargained for. You will find her set of mind, her…
And one other thing, Fear not she is frail This young girl though she’s slender You’ve seen the pitless bee Swoop hard in his flower — But no stem’s ever snap’t Take her firmly. No half-hesitant pressing’s Gotten all the sugarcane’s Sap. — Anonymous from the Subhàsitàvalì
the soul, Remembering how she felt, but what she felt Remembering not (Wordsworth) When your post-War Plymouth rattled up to our eternal practice, and you vaulted the fence, we’d drift down from the wildness memory does not hold, still half sky from shagging day-long flies. Sweat-suited, someone’s father, you’d bawl “Men!” Did the future press…
I turn from the mirror to the garden where the December rose grows up orange above the wall. Soughing the grasses chinked in and threaded on its top — the wind displaces the still life of a great turf, like Durer’s. The great gray rain comes slanting down interrupting the museum in my eyes. Ars…
only partly accounted for by the old delivery truck laden with bread that hums up the coastline highway the redtail hawks switch to and fro on the crosswinds, they drift towards sunrise and sunset stitching the wind of the east to the wind of the west
I like the way wasps always put me in mind of washing, when the summer was bright and the shade fell in stripes from the shutters. Then the blood runs swift in its vessels, the spots on vipers’ skins seem sharper. Even brambles grow venomous, women stroll down to the shore to watch in the…
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