Poetry

After the Lenigrad trials, after solitary confinement most of eleven years in a Siberian gulag, he told us this story. One slice of sour black bread a day. He trimmed off the crust and saved it for the last since it was the best part. Crunchy, even a little sweet. Then he crumbled the slice…

I don't stay in town long. I drive out to Race Point— bright stunt kites, diving and sailing in the stiff north wind, and people walking the beach. The sea's sunny and dark. I drive on, down to Herring Cove, park, and walk the beach myself. A man and woman are fishing. “What do you…

‘The Excavation', ‘History’, and ‘Meurig Dafydd to His Mistress' are three poems from what I hope will be a continuing sequence of alternative monologues. That is to say, personae poems in which a different version of myth or history is adumbrated. As Euripides once stressed, Helen did not necessarily end up in Troy!. Absurd those…

This isn't a story I want to tell, or need to. I've shoveled the night's hard snowfall from the drive and heaped it, mailbox-high, for the neighbor kids to stomp over. I've fed the squirrels and put out black sunflower and wild weed seed for the birds— the female cardinal rose and dusky and black…

Afterward, it sent me back to that passage in Chaucer about the birds that slepen al the nyght with open ye, and pretty soon that made me think of another passage, in Coleridge, about nightingales perched giddily on blossomy twigs, their eyes both bright and full. It wasn't long, though, before I thought of a…

to Peter Vansittart The last war-horse slaughtered and eaten long ago. Not a rat, not a crow-crumb left; the polluted water scarce; the vile flies settling on the famous enlarged eyes of skeleton children. Tonight the moon's open-mouthed. I must surrender in the morning. But those cipher tribes out there, those Golden Hordes, those shit!…

Just finished reading Matthews’ Blues If You Want. And Carruth's essay on Thoreau, where he gives a good, swift kick to all that rich-boy mystical-Utopian stuff. Yesterday, I took a break, and in the 90-degree afternoon heat, with a good wind blowing and a cold Miller's sweating on a stump, sawed down the two small…

This time, Death is rising, waving its big bird wing, anthracite plume, smoke and smudge of a twilit sky E. A. Poe would have delighted in. Along the river lights spread, bridges sway into brilliance, it's all so sudden, like coming out of anesthesia, gates opening, ascent and arrival, the elevator lifting suavely into consciousness….

No word I huffed when Stradling urged the squire to throw my eulogy on the fire. The fiddlers laughed. I, snow-silent, proud, did not melt. But I'm spitless now, my pearl, my buttercup, my bread-fruit. I rattle their silver in my pocket. I have other stanzas for harp and lute, other gullible lords to flatter….