Poetry

Think of the blackouts during the War. Whole cities Disappearing like flowers folding their petals at dusk As if each town Were lying down to sleep In the arms of lost and hidden cities; Sprawled beside Troy, nestled next to Pompeii, Fallen across the arm of Atlantis breathing like a current. And what is the…

Sometimes driving home from the library at night I take the long way leading out of town past Buttermilk Road and the paper mill where there is one light on and the nightwatchman between rounds stares through a golden cubicle, his back to the moon rising on summer nights so he can see each vehicle…

I've bicycled out into the blue fieldlight to glimpse them: a few flecks zigzagging down a hillside. drawn to the lighted compounds igniting at this hour and echoing the sky. Before long they stop, shy of a smell or barbed wire, circling on old pissed-on ground yellowed once more, and wait. Once, as a child…

The boat sailing over from the island dock, about to capsize near the harbor buoy, was a splash of red and white paint his father knew would catch the boy's eye. We act from feelings, his father said, and unlike the fine detail of foam lacing the white-capped water, true action lives in the beauty…

Reading about how in mythologies god came down in a shower of gold or some such immaculate way to mate with mortals, I think of how my daughter Angel came to be conceived in the front seat of an old '56 Lincoln after bar-closing time. And of how, with panties in my pocket, an unhooked…

A summer night, Detroit about to suffocate on its own exhausts, I headed west on Victor looking for Tessie. Leaning late in her window, Mrs. Kessarjian across the street was still in her black dress as if waiting for business. Hammer and Borka and their gangs on the corner of John R and Victor banged…

To vibrate out a tone of lasting woe; To send a foggy message, Brewing a mellow humor in the sharp, Naked unatmosphere of cinder block In the cafeteria; To expel, as though from a great depth, a note. But whose ambitions were these? They weren't mine For more than half an hour. Reflected in the…

A man whose wife's enlarged heart was going learned of a drug That would enlarge the mind. The couple was old, but      enlarging The mind with a drug was a new idea. Make the date late      Eisenhower, early Kennedy. The couple was old, not born in this century, and the woman's      heart, Stretched in girlhood…

Our road passed through a flooded field— the pale, whitish water spread around us, then a dark border of trees . . . men were swimming in a kind of marathon. We watched them from our car, you beside me full of expectation and controlled hope—a quiet, a modulated joy. The water reflected the milky…