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Of course the family’d call him Todd, the tie to someone’s maiden life and short, masculine. And of course he’d be blond, fragile in his Confederate uniform. Todd Carter, over the mantel, age twenty-five. Came riding up in the Battle of Franklin, one hundred feet from his own front door to six bullets. They dragged…

(for Peter Taylor) The sad, because unspeaking, smiles overbrimming among too many people known too slightly but halfway loved, in large rooms where the light shades and flickers on the untended gardens, vines and harpstrings, of the old wallpaper . . . Whom do we speak to when we speak on these stages we make…

Dear Bob: Thanks for your typical douche letter. Since Xmas I haven’t been doing much. I can say that I’m not watching TV all day, or smoking pot. I read Books, write letters, learn Swahili, —Smoke pot—, look for jobs, which Includes travelling and throwing my knife. I’m getting pretty good at it. I can,…

From the house, it was the spread-out apron, a flat theatre of loose-strife & thistle, rimmed with pines that caught the sun on the tops after four o’clock. We never should have bought the house, it was too much, the land, the view, the May grass we sat down upon to compute interest, taxes &…

I. It was the first time a really sumptuous girl had taken                                                                  his hand, and Rome lay before them: the Spanish Steps’ Cinderella night-piece, dream-whitecaps falling/rising to Bernini’s drowning, monstrous boat . . . They left behind his more glamorous, her more dowdy,            …

Glasses drained, Cigars smoked to their bands, Conversation. Deep looks. Smiles. Night lurches, repeats itself, Sees double in our little Glassed-in terrace-garden. Winds down, as fog calms the city Spun from the blue smoke Running Circles around us. Speakers lost in foliage Direct cooling airs— Stately, bright, insouciant— Conditioned as we are To the little…

New willows slantwise in the sun blow all their chattreuse stripes in diagonal flags. Spring is a silent parade thinning the blood with surprise that it can still cause alarm and amazement. Vertical slips of tulip stand in the brown mud— the soldiery of May. By accident I drove to a town near my husband’s…

That you should have disappeared from the landing and have carried with you the dead rabbit that twitched its nose in last summer’s grey green half-dawn and our pale, cool northern night— That I followed without thinking and on foot past the abandoned station, its doric columns, all the furled      sails, the upward angling concrete…

The sun’s leached everything, the last dream of heading for some Greek island, the sea blue there as in March, or October. The rain gave out over a month ago. In mind are only the other summers, and my hands, calloused, fit the hands of a friend drowned eight, nine years back in the Wisconsin…