East Coker: sun afire in midwinter, rain-of-gold Teardrops at tip of holly and ivy leaf Instills nativity. (A warm day Travelers had of it down from Wells to St. Michael's Church, where T. S. E.'s ancestors Once bowed their heads then sailed for “Jerusalem.”) Scion, return and nest your ashes Here in the wall at…
For years a sign near Randy Miser's yard announced: MEDORA TOWN OF HARMONY A bar of music showed beneath those words the first notes of the scale ordered mi, do, re. I've wondered driving in—to Mel's for beer, past our shut-down factory— what tune that railroad man was whistling while he pounded ties. Who heard…
He makes a myth of everything he does: At dawn he puts his shirt on—that's a poem; At night he takes it off—same deal. Alone, He drinks to blot out the young man he was. Oh, he was fine—muscles rippling, the fire Of subject matter in his eyes: his home Was what he wrote about…
1. The sky is like the belly of a snake. 2. My mare shakes powdered sugar from her coat. 3. How much freeze and thaw can tulips take? 4. The river's out. We come and go by boat. 5. John Deeres upholster fields in corduroy. 6. Shoots flicker like heat lightning through the dust. 7….
The “texts” hang from her jaws like bags of feed— The one end chews; the other drops its pile. The nameplate on her door reads, or should read: “World's Largest Overstimulated Child.” Like Pegasus, she takes the “aerie” view— (Whose work holds interest if her own cannot?)— And trundles down the runway, lifts—(Mon Dieu! The…
Even the surface of the street stirs; birds squawk up and circle; wind rushes from nowhere till tree limbs thrash. From two directions in the café, some kind of jazz whines— saxophone in one speaker, anxious, wire brush in the other, svelte and anxious too, stroking the cymbal till it stirs. I imagine it glinting…
She knew she was cousin to Freud, Fraud. She knew how her dreams governed her life. She hadn't flown in the cockpit for forty years, and yet the feel of it was in her hands, her body bend, only because she had dreamed again last night of flying the Martin Marauder (at night the big…
The insistent logic of rain makes you turn from the window and try once again to read the book that made you cry when you were thirteen, the age the Maid of Orléans saw St. Michael ride down from the flaming sky and tell her to mind her mother and always be a good girl….
Just before their divorce, still living Like a king, he bought me a donkey Pulling a cartload of flowers. The one gold wheel Under my fingers spun around in the light. I wanted his drunkenness, His laughter lost in smoker's cough, his lies About Lila and Nadine, the secret phone calls To stop. If I…
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