A maple leaf with the sun shining through it at the end of summer is beautiful, but not too much so, and even an ordinary electric train passing by nearly three hundred yards away makes music, light and unobtrusive, and yet to be remembered, for some sort of usefulness perhaps, or even instructiveness (the world…
Stand up, stand up for JEE-zus! my father sings, my brother and I stand in the tub shivering as he scrubs our privates: the year is 1948, Raleigh, the moon slips clear of the tulip poplars, then the rough back rub with clean towels, first one and then the other and then to bed, If…
Ohhhhhhhhh—I've forgotten the tickets! A cry of distress rises in the blue Honda plodding over a two-lane New Hampshire highway, wedged between the curves of the road and the hard curves of the RVs refusing to move their metal bulk aside. We're halfway there but it would be hours to go home again. We tell…
And sometimes they are birthcries, ancient audience, succulent moon and Milky Way, and sometimes they are prayers, jubilant paths, perilous constellations, this spirited, whirling jewelry I must wear, these bride-shy or ruffian hoops, this work-that-must-be-done in beauty, in beauty— Look, my dance is a willingness away from poverty's arrows, all the known hells, a brisk…
They arrive in the blustery summer twilight, couples in coupes, roadsters, and touring cars, up from Falmouth and Hyannisport in Palm Beach suits and taffeta weave. There is dancing to Paul Whiteman and Alice Fay. What summons our attention—my mother-in-law told me this—is not the soft flags luffing at each high corner of the pavilion,…
What's Hitchcock up to in this bad movie? The eerie music rises to crescendo Scaring me before there's any danger. A circular staircase spirals into shadow. My heart starts pounding at his grisly tricks— A gunman's silhouette, a mysterious key, A creaking blind, darkness, unknown steps, A cowardly tramp who only wants to flee And…
Little chameleon swooning for a tin pot of old water, you remind me of our worst lieutenant generals, balancing on tiptoes, yanked tall and then swollen with greed, curling their thick tongues like hoodwinked nooses down into the blue bowl— the color of tricky sky, of well-traveled ocean glass, the last emptied bottle tossed overboard—…
Obscenity stares at me mockingly Through dark American history Like an owl glaring out of An old shit-filled barn. I glare back at this glowing, Enigmatic image, and hear Henry Miller's voice laughing Out of his owlish disguise: “You can't fudge or fug it Instead of saying fuck. Words are like lonely buoys Floating in…
These are among my favorite poems I have written because they came to me effortlessly, like gifts. One day I found myself writing a playful love poem to a sculpture of twelve green cabbages neatly laid out in a plot on the flagstone courtyard of the Fogg Art Museum. Afterwards, other works of sculpture and…
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