Poetry

The provinces of his body revolted. —W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” The histories are rife with various versions. Some of them cite those first covert incursions Of double agents turned far to the south And sent north to the land’s unwary mouth (As if it had a mouth), smuggling their goods…

According to the wisdom brewing at the seminar table, a poem that begins with petunias should find a way to get away from petunias. It should deviate from its path, break the flower-chain of content transcending botanical considerations altogether. But sometimes a poem shows no interest in executing a sudden turn, swerving off in some…

If you’re a pig from Ohio, all muscle and gristle, not knowing they’re planning to rend you into bacon, what better place to find a wallow than this blue-black mud where you can keep yourself cool as you wait for David from Williamsfield, Ohio, Sergeant in the Army’s 4th Infantry— two thousand- six-hundred-fifty-seventh casualty whose…

Toward evening, as the light failed and the pear tree at my window darkened, I put down my book and stood at the open door, the first raindrops gusting in the eaves, a smell of wet clay in the wind. Sixty years ago, lying beside my father, half asleep, on a bed of pine boughs…

You have to tell a story. —Lester Young, on improvisation   A Saturday night outside town; full moon risen above the fields, their summer heat and fragrance drifting through the open doors of the roadhouse. Inside, I’m sitting-in with Joe and The Troubadours, a college boy trying to find the right notes on a pawnshop…

Hammer out of the cage the movie insists: banged blonde, blocked highway the gorilla helps wreck—look, Ma, no cloverleaf. The chaste scene. The woman born from the thigh she is holding, the one eye of the truck that becomes worry. I’m not the Lithuanian accenting Every threat, I’m not even the foliage that spends itself…

Students all too commonly misconstrue the poem in which Sappho calls that man equal to a god, who, opposite you, leans in and        whispers, etcetera, tending to assume it’s about two people: speaker/loved one? Beloved and man near her, bending close to her, whom the poet hears as,        heads close together, they laugh softly? Wait:…

Such shrieking from the scrub jays, And then I see what’s up: A crow has a half-grown jay pinned on its back And is hammering like a cartoon Woodpecker at its breast. The adult jays force the crow a few feet away, But the terrified groundling can only manage A feeble waggle of its feet…

The gray building of a pig farm, inside Grunting and growling, almost black doughy mud Through which they slogged, in squelching rubber boots, That wet summer abounding in frogs, they worked By accident on this farm, not quite a farm, in a poor Region of dwarf pines and junipers, Partly withered, at the edge of…