The power was off. We cleared dishes from the table. Shutters crashed against the windows. Below us, in the lake, the minnows were in a frenzy. Limbs cracked like knuckles—one great trunk smashed to the ground. Leaves flew past, pasted themselves to the panes. Somewhere, my father was on a train. The blue walls quaked,…
(For W.C. Williams and Hoyt Wilhelm) to govern so the concrete in motion with the most tenuous of grips to force as much by will as act the erratic to hold within a predetermined form to summon with an easy minimalist grace the capacity repeatedly to baffle: it is the haven of the fortunately old,…
A dusky cloud, a tree, a giant (caught on the line of magnification) deeply whorled hand from the group at the center. A picturesque little house with watersteps and a boat, momentarily forsaken. You can see its boatman down by the lagoon with two others, pointing deeper into the painting with a shrewd air of…
Did your mother ever wear a hat with a whole bird’s nest growing on it, or a dress patterned with naked bodies? Remember how long the street seemed then, how you stepped behind her to investigate a fence post, shop window, blade of grass, anything to let you fall behind? Perhaps she was an immigrant,…
Siste, viator Bereaved of mind by a weird truck, Our fraternal philosopher To whom a Spring snow was mortal Winter— a wild driver in the best Of cases, on the margins of Communicability— exchanged a bad Appointment in New Hampshire For a grave in the Jewish Cemetery In Waltham, Massachusetts. Across The street…
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…
Doniphan Louthan, 1920-1952 I do not remember the day you disappeared. I was too young to understand, still small enough to curl up in your hat. When I questioned mother years later, she told me you had gone to heaven, but I knew better. You were in her heart, and kept it beating by pacing…
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