Poetry

Beyond the dark souks of the old city, beyond the Dome of the      Rock gray and humped and haunted, beyond the eyes of the men at      the café where they drink their thimblefuls of hot tea, beyond the valley with its scar of naked pipe, the perfect geometrical arcs of      irrigation, and someone incising a…

Maybe it was the season, coming again to the border of the cold time, though the sky stayed crazy October blue, every tree preening its last greenness before the turning and falling. The weather was in ecstasy while all the women on the bus were weeping in silence, discreetly. And I was weeping with them—…

Confused, using no maps, oldies on fire, the would-be sister, Glenda, I inhabit, drives a transformed hearse inside America all night. Craving breast milk cut with booze, seduced, come dawn, by Last Chance Supper Hut, she catches Death (dressed as a stranger in a red-and-white checked shirt) paying attention: I'd got her self large in…

Sweeping from the shrouded mouths of volcanoes, in gusts, in feathers, coaxing the trembling leaves to fly from their anxieties, covering the pathways with sweat, bathing the sanctuaries in encrustations of uncivil marrow— hesitating, plunging, crazy with romance— this heat is totally absorbing, busy, irresistible, and it has caused many marriages and children, and one…

A man wakens at 4 A.M. from a dream of ground round on a piece of rye toast. Having gone to college, he wonders what can it mean. He sits on the bed rubbing the yellowed soles of his feet, but it brings no spiritual comfort, so he rises to dress. He chooses black designer…

You and he and all your friends being herded among wheat-tawny sheep down a country lane waves of ferns topping embankments of gold dirt hooves and heels raising a wafer-scented dustglow to the air hard breath like butter gilding mouths joining voices bleating like a choir it's mid-morning the boys rising free into true blond-tenor…

Love & fresh water—on the tongue of Romance, Gallic insouciance or Socrates' truth this world would break to break you for your bread. In its freedom we shine repugnant as slugs, water's simplest flesh. Having ascended the luminous steps that lead through Plato's Phaedo out of the body, remote above its joys and misery like…

Sixteen years ago, in the high meadows on the French side of the mountains, a clear April late morning, a warm wind slowing through the young grains and grasses, the sun touching everything with yellow light. I called to my son Teddy, then fifteen, to come see, and he left the car to stand beside…

My father the mouse, small, brown,      drinks quietly from his bottle cap of      Schaefer's, jerking his head up now and then to the dim kitchen light, his mouse      whiskers trembling, his mouse feet tucked under the table      where they tap into the night. Look at him nibbling      his one piece of bread, his one slice…