Poetry

First I place you in the garden at the head of the white table; fruit in a clay bowl, flowers in their first opening around you. Now I build the wind, one from the north wreathed in cold and from the south, wet. I give you dominion over wind. Now I build the rooms where…

When I closed my eyes I thought about playing tennis with him a long time ago on the deserted court, a mile from the ocean. And the rallies that lasted a long time. While the overhead clouds drifted like gulls. Thought not so     much about him as the field of us. The sun-embalmed afternoons…

A spacious night, the ward quiet but for a male nurse humming Klezmer music to your roommate, an elderly Polish widow suffering in body only, her roofless mind deluged by grace as the first priest to orbit Earth administers extreme unction to New York City, its helium balloon of Christ punctured beyond repair and dying…

The child is being pushed by the mother, in the swing that lifts over the deep lawn in May. Is being pushed towards the tall hedge of bamboo where the father must go in a world that is houses and neighbors gardens and furniture. Until the child floats backwards through     the air to be…

The early sun is so pale and shadowy, I could be looking up at a ghost in the shape of a window, a tall, rectangular spirit looking down at me in bed, about to demand that I avenge the murder of my father. But the morning light is only the first line in the play…

We need centuries of them. You wake up late in the morning, the dark wind flowing through you, and all day long it is the only thing that makes sense: wind, that slides a hand under your boots on the pavement and carries; wind, that slices at the lips and cuts. In it we listen…

There is a section in my library for death and another for Irish history, a few shelves for the poetry of China and Japan, and in the center a row of imperturbable reference books, the ones you can turn to anytime, when the night is going wrong or when the day is full of empty…

1. Today I walk, find countless calla lilies. How anything grows its own perfect white and stays that way—unafraid of world. It is lovely, so I look. It doesn’t matter what it thinks of me. 2. This is what I’ve been given to look at. I never chose to be here— California gardens, riches. There…

for Mary Sorry for the tardiness of my response. I’ve been lost in thought, unable to reach you. Your message arrived, brown, brain-sized nut, stripped to its rough shell, my name and address singed on. I want you to know I read it carefully, held it to my ear and listened to the mystery that…