Poetry

  • The Country House

    Asking     Carrying a bucket full     Of a broken window or     Watching people and their mirrors on     TV; the woods tamped down     By snow and the very high iron of trees;     Air passes from purple to blue into     Black pitched lower than trees;     Glass for this     Half-week….

  • The Bat

    They kept him alive for years in warm water, The soldier who had lost his skin.                                                          At night He was visited by the wounded bat He had unfrozen after Passchendaele, Locking its heels under his forefinger And whispering into the mousy fur. Before letting the pipistrelle flicker Above his summery pool and tipple there,…

  • The Ha-Ha, Part II: I Cry My Heart, Antonio

    —at Dal Pescatore, Cannetto sull’Oglio, just outside Mantova It’s just as the waiter has brought us                             a single buttery dumpling        stuffed with pecorino, parmigiano, and ricotta that arrives after the porcini mushrooms                             and the seafood risotto        and before the snapper with tomato and black olives   and the duck in balsamic…

  • Scarcity

    Brush of sunlight on the dry grass. These shadows blowing black up the mountain, and elsewhere there is laughing, you are moderate, see, I am there. A noise from inside the neighbor’s window. In the dark drifts you gather— let drop the poor idea— kisses him swiftly and leaves. That we may be increased. Thrum…

  • Edward Thomas’s Poem

    I I couldn’t make out the minuscule handwriting In the notebook the size of his palm and crinkled Like an origami quim by shell-blast that stopped His pocket watch at death. I couldn’t read the poem. II From where he lay he could hear the skylark’s Skyward exultation, a chaffinch to his left Fidgeting among…

  • Then

    Thrift built us a shed out back in which to stow our set. I see a sky. A cloud with a carpenter’s hand in it. I know that shed. An all-day affair with particle board and steel hinges. All of us standing at attention, feeling—     my family and I— (and I was youngest, and…

  • The Pond of Desires

    “. . . most desires end up in stinking ponds . . .” —Auden The water, if you can call it that, is black as tar, and the lily pads are seared at the edges, curling up as if trying not to touch it more than they have to. The lilies themselves have gone to…