Poetry

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…

“It's not August! It's not August!” the man cries through my sleep, the man with the closed eyes. I know, I know, it's April. Why call for the terrible bird of ripeness to descend? A cell will destroy you in the startling end. I'd like to know what I've inherited. I'd like to know what…

One      The angels are sitting on their asses. Their wings      are clean. They do not bend to search the straw.      They do not think of finding anything buried in      the corner. Smooth, cold, white. None are related;      they are all angels. Who knows how much they      weigh? They do not care to mourn. They are…