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…
Horseface was so dark they called her purple she appeared at dances without a date she sat and stood feet keeping time silent and alone little Mary (Horseface) stroked her hair and sighed little Mary so black her skin sings and shines so black they talk behind her back oh she was so black her…
I'm not Charles Darwin . . . I'm a computer, A logic machine modeled after the brain, But the brain is more than a logic machine, The brain takes everything and makes it new; It snaps like a turtle at the sources of novelty. If an object is bumpy, I respond to it; If an…
Corten steel and aluminum When did it begin, the hardening, the first tremors of arteriosclerosis of the art. Was it barely perceptible, a pudding thickening, or a pond that froze overnight from the center seed spreading. What became of your great, quivering toilets, larded kitchens of pots distilling jelly, the whole shaking show of giant…
You claimed as the one worth of your regrettable childhood the knowledge you'd gained to make another's childhood exemplary. You felt yourself quite able to withhold any emotion except love. You were a rod, your son's rod, your practiced calm his confidence, solace, and security. From books you learned carrot and stick, the four-year-old's embracing…
Death of a Travel Writer, of which this contribution forms a part, is an extended sequence of poems purporting to come from a deceased travel writer. The poems are part biography, part diary, part dream of fantasy. The finished sequence will have about twenty or so separate parts—which may or may not remain numbered—but the…
Acrylic resin paint on canvas No longer tension, no dimension, only the words without letters floating in their washes, hiding Salomé, the figure behind our musings trapped in her camouflaging dance. The limit makes the shape and we have none, no bodies for the indistinct yearnings ebbing into mist, desire and mist. Imagine the sea…
Every day the boy marks her progress: at the round window, her round eye, the bluebird that scrambled in and out with grass, or moss, with string, hair, wool, the innermost feathers of her breast. And if he's spotted her in the bush or on the wing, he lifts away the front wall of the…
What I dare to hope may be my next book will—Muses and publishers willing—consist of four longish poems, each focussed on a woman and each involving a relationship with (no, not her, but) a prior text. Something after a seventy-year-old friend had told me the story of her dramatic escape from war-torn Poland, I was…
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