Poetry

  • The Box

    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…

  • The Girl from Zlot

    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…

  • A Child’s Nature

    He was to arrive at San Francisco, a six-year-old boy flying from China alone for twenty hours. We went there to meet him, hoping he still remembered us, since he had not seen us for three years. We waited patiently at the airport, till all passengers came through the customs. Did he miss the plane?…

  • The Mailbox

    New York, January. I am in the act of reaching out a hand to put a letter in the mailbox. The letter is a request to an old acquaintance (old now, perhaps; he certainly seemed old to me twenty years ago) for advice about a book I am contemplating, a gathering of recollections about my…

  • Stuff

    In the duplication center I xerox a hundred pages of the usual stuff, you know the stuff. I xerox maybe a branch's worth, maybe a small lower branch of Georgia loblolly pine: evergreen scent of toner, & when I close my eyes, I see the long needles of light along my branch. Sometimes, the stuff…

  • Time in Armagh

    I Hazing, they call it in America, but I already knew it from Armagh, the fledgling hauled to the pump, protesting, by the bigger boys to be baptised with his nickname, Froggy, Screwy, Rubberneck or Dopey, some shameful blemish, his least attractive aspect, hauled out to harry, haunt him through his snail years in St….