Poetry

Snow trims the dead elm and the black fire escape. Against the chill sky, the red roof burns through a skim of white. Bills and sympathy notes accumulate behind the flat door. The history of the house is hidden to the eye—the alarm in the attic, the glitter of a decade’s argument. Standing at my…

The morning harvest startles me with its generosity. Feedcorn spills over the wooden wagon, the milkweed has fattened and waits, calling touch me, touch here! Buckled up, shuffled into pairs my children challenge the very air in front of them. They grant my knees an obedient hug, they march away, so temperate, so prudent with…

I was never beautiful. I learned by heart the octaves of grief and the peculiar phrases of a man’s desires. Mine was the chord seldom struck; oh they gave me an arm to walk over the esplanade. I walked with the arm. They stood near the edge, watching, humming the ruse of the borrowed car…

Once words stunned the field, like sudden rain, as if Rain were the name of a woman, whose eyes drenched yours alive in the full torrent of saying exactly what she wanted to say. Then husbandry took over: the dry stare of a dry bush, piling one odd rock on top of another odd rock…

Our eyes unlash slowly one by one at last bald lids rise What for Mimicry re the poet’s eye looking inwards sees without the lashes’ soft-pleaded intercedence too pupilly cool cruel as muttered justice I call my goodbyes home in the dusk

After the month in Sicily, the ocean’s edge unravelling around our own volcanic knees; after the dark plums that throbbed like fairy tale hearts in the woodsman’s basket; the voyage in another’s arms where we were innocent as tourists visiting familiar landscapes for the first time we come back to our old lives as to…

The door slams. The corpse sits up. The dog says, “Don’t look at me.” They have planned this in Hollywood. They have planned your elopment with the boy with silver cufflinks. They have planned his mother’s anger, the snobbishness caught in her teeth, gooey as a night of bile. When you unbutton your blouse —…

Sometimes when the sun is perfect as an apple in a still- life with oranges, and clouds are all coming home to me, like horses, the way I want them, and the city is far enough away for once, the ocean no longer a lost coffin to be prayed over constantly, I remember we will…

     In 1593 Calingicus Wrote a tract on the mortality of birds. I do not desire to point out how much error Traces his diagrammatic sureness, only To say he saw the species at a new angle, Being somehow reminded in their motion Not of the dilated freedom we live in But of the tight chain…