Poetry

from Ten Days in Russia Beneath you the road is smoke, the bridges thunder and everything is left far behind . . . Russia, where are you flying to? —Gogol, from Dead Souls You ancients out there, bulky, dark-coated women, you wait so patiently for a bus that never comes, as you must have waited…

At this point in the development of “When All the Walls Are Down,” the poem and I have brought each other as far as we can go. From now on, I suspect, revision will mainly involve aeration. Without it the poem would be, as my Eve says of Adam, “plunged into his talk's / spring-tide”…

There's nothing more seductive than the basement of this gated and clapboard building in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, on a Sunday afternoon when Sister Walker's got the turkey wings and the fried chicken and the baked macaroni and the green beans and candied yams simmering on every burner in the tiny kitchen while upstairs all the brothers…

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…

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…