One college night twenty years ago Snyder and I shared a quart of Cutty Sark, and after every drink hurled shot glasses at the concrete wall and Jimmy Cagney. Thinking we were tougher than punks, we swallowed lit cigarettes and kicked each other in the gut. When the proctor ordered us to knock it off,…
He's built a large house, for himself and his third wife, in the country, and you're here for the dinner given to honor the famous poet, who knows Professor B., the host, from college. The poet looks drained, not just from meeting faces he must be cordial to, but from something deeper and more painfully…
Fire shimmied & reached up From the iron furnace & grabbed Sawdust from the pitchfork Before I could make it across The floor or take a half step Back, as the boiler room sung About what trees were before Men & money. Those nights Smelled of greenness & sweat As steam moved through miles Of…
The child patting the dog felt the feathering side of the dog falling and rising as the dog dreamt. And the child was dog, became dog sleeping there by the fire; he matched the dog's in and out breathing, the dog's happiness in being petted. Oblivious, the dog dreamt, twitched, warmed by fire, fur, and…
for Robert Duncan The small white roses are the first to bow, drying closed to withered buds the way I've seen a girlishness fold over my mother ordering in restaurants, finding a seat on the bus. See, see. The small white roses and freesias and red berries falling from the rhapsodic stalks. See what the…
Driving home from your funeral there was nowhere else to go except along that two-lane switchback, into the town of Plain Dealing, Louisiana, nothing open at 10 p.m., no place I could stay. Further on I found the sky-blue motel with a sign in the yard that crackled like a bug light, an old man…
After our daughter's last milk and fruit, long after the bath's tugboat and its cargo of plastic squares and yellow ducks has docked on the tub, after her toothbrushing that amounts to nothing more than sucking the paste from the brush, she begins another ritual of afters meant to postpone her going down for good:…
Four a.m. and the trees in their nocturnal turns seem free from our ideas of what trees should be like the moment in a dance you let your partner go and suddenly she's loose fire and unapproachable. Yesterday I saw L. again, by a case of kiwis and she seemed wrongly tall as if wearing…
I can still hear Robert Frost. He was the first. Who struggled up to the front, his white hair tossed across his eyes. The undergraduates grinned to hear a man snap twigs among the scholars. I remember Auden, too, in the great hall at Balliol, telling us he was sick. He had come home to…
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