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He is pulling blood in, trying to be strong in the mirror. The word gives him trouble and he pushes it away, wondering, what will come now? who will come? All his adventures are in his mind. The large muscles serve no one. He dreams of Germany and hopes to be a policeman. He would…

Why does a girl love a girl? Why do you still have messages for me? Descending the stairs in the tubercular house every Easter morn      Melanie would come upon a group of Quaker women they glided over in drabs and whispered things to her alone in her father’s barn she would tell me this while…

All through that Sunday afternoon a kite flew above the Sunday, a tightened drumhead, an armful of blown chaff. I’d seen it gray and slippy in the making, I’d tapped it when it dried out white and stiff, I’d tied the bows of newspaper along its six-foot tail. But now it was far up like…

She’s like the moon: at perigee his tides are out of whack, his coasts tormented. What was one place is called another, farther in or out than on the charts or in old stories. He rents a plane and flies up in the evening to observe as one might an eclipse, or storm, or nine…

Rain stretches along the heaving avenue— The building and clouds are stacked gray on gray. We avoid the rivers of water until it is useless— The rain is full of clothes. *      *      * Later in the year the grass and bushes were so dry we hoped a large wind would blow them away. When…

     My mother was dying. I didn’t know that, didn’t know why I couldn’t be at home when she had left the hospital to be there. He would take me to Lucile’s and leave me and I’d hate it. I’d worry that I’d have to stay and go on living there like one of hers, like…

In all the cathedrals of Europe I’ve seen only one smiling angel, feathered wings like the others, blasted by war. She’s famous not only because she’s smiling but because of the smile. It might be that the harvest is fine, but I don’t think so: too much reflected mischief in her face. As if a…

for Louis, my father As God knows,           the child sees,                 in middle age The strewn windfall of the befallen.                            Today I am reading the poems written when I was a child (the cobalt tower text Of Hart Crane; spinster Stevens’ intricate Book of needles; oracular Yeats, Unkind). And I am writing a…