Poetry

He could appreciate all The explosion accomplished, The tools they handed him, the manifold tools And their manifold applications. As I was starting to say—the explosion . . . A pungent lawlessness in the air, Like sheep ablaze. He found the barrenness Quite attractive, and said so, So that everyone heard, could hear, But not…

Poised in the garden just before dawn Souls hover in a trance before the window Or fly slanting and darting through the trees. And down on the plain where the sun Has yet to rise but whose heat roils Upward and turns the night to silver vapor, Souls swarm across the stubbled fields. Now, as…

My mother waited till now to hand down this gold razor her father let slip in the washbowl. In a hurry to teamster the horses, soap in his earlobe and nostril, he climbed into the fire wagon. When she poured the wash water onto pebbles, hard gold sluiced at the bottom with the whiskers. A…

—suggested by John Searle’s thought experiment My one bulb may cast more shadows than light (the corners are always lost) but it proliferates in the red and black lips of my four thousand six hundred twenty-three lacquered trays, and I can see well enough to do my job. The room is compact. I can reach…

Though I’ve lived a life and I have lived amongst men and I have Loved this life as an experiment—an act of science And an act of ruth—I’ve kept for this city my last half heart (I lost the other to the chance of art.) And so, stirred of a         loud silence, Slow snow as…

He had done what he promised himself he would do— Kept his mouth shut in the bar—but now driving The miles to her house he felt the talk rising Inside him like ardor, the heat of self-love. But he swore to himself that tonight he would talk Mostly with his shoulders and eyes, let his…

for Gary Holthaus Seven geese, southwest, and seven flat-black ships, converging in the Colorado sky, before the pale haze of early winter, bright and bronze and empty, on a Sunday just approaching noon. I count the birds again: seven. And the helicopters: seven, in a line northeast, their rotors blurred and sounding faint percussion, high…

Showered in ghosts his trees sing forked over by wind each inherits a musical gift but the fever’s got by subscription revelry abounds on wet cobblestones of the commuter moon the moon’s new zoo’s main attractions being card-boxed turmoil (say the mobile mind breaks down on its own Utopia Parkway) by Joseph Cornell and softly…

I sit on the porch tonight, smoking my last cigarette, savoring it the way a crow at the edge of the highway feeds until the last second, hopping a little dance on the carcass. The trees are stark, the branches hover, ready to sprout in this warm feast of air. I would like to feast…