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On the table landscape of my desolate kitchen in the middle of Ireland in the bleary damp of spring— butter rises like a greasy fort from a saffron yellow saucer. A washcloth, pale yellow is folded as a miniature tent over the toys the children ranged, militia-like around their breakfast. Doorways in Fitzwilliam Square bear…

I had been thinking about love, how hard It is to remember How to fall in love, How love has the frankness Of giving in and the firmness Of logic, and yet when I tried To discover this order I noticed, far down on the beach, The swimmers testing The water, which must have been…

Though you’re an old woman, I mean dead,      I make plans to save you: arrange your voice to stream into my room,      dig up your body, give you mouth to mouth. I sweep your house, crawl into your bed, croon      in your ear. I insist you eat. I will you back with every tooth and…

There were flowers all summer long in my side pasture, anemones’ & poppies, all the largesse of a place tended a while. I buy them when I see them on the street in tin buckets from those rough men, the flower men. There is so much black I hadn’t seen before in their fast bloom,…

for M.H.O. That which I should have done I did not do. Here on the porch The beginning of spring Or end of winter Reflects off the screen.                                   I stare at you Who now can barely see Even the light that sparks The tunnels of dust. You are blind, Prideful and sentimental      …

the mind opens like milk     the old bottles cream balanced on top     paper caps snapped perfectly into glass rims                  tilts deeper to watch the dividing line stretch out     union of ecru and bluewhite      drop by drop     remembers light glazing the bottle’s neck a woman’s shoulder            learning to pour dream into a pitcher     to drink from a cup…

White birches scream winter, their treetops fright wigs attenuated in the arc light. Small planes and radio-beacon spires dot the black sky like stars amid the cirrus patches scurrying north for denser cover. Out in the russia-flats between cities wheatlike anonymous marshgrass denies the complications of leavetaking or arrival. Towns pale the dark with self-importance….

My name is Pablo Picasso And my name rhymes In French, in Catalan, even in American As I travel, stopping often To call aloud the single word Lady I find my ghost is still feared. I’d like to answer: This was my body, I give it to you, And this my art, which is only…

1. Sometimes my lips would appear flecked with lipstick or, more often, the roofing-tar the neighbor kids chewed— all the while, my father, afraid to ground his suspicions by naming them, bit his tongue. 2. Turning from a Chagall, you blurt “I want a divorce . . . ssh, we’ll talk later.” The Louvre darkens…