In the years we couldn't live together on land, my family had a houseboat, four families, really, fourteen children among them. I liked to study the adults: one of them, a mortician's son and grandson and great-grandson, who put extra syllables in his words to keep them around longer; one woman, whose legs and hair…
Often I miss the old poems, the High Ones: the sober Miltonian cosmosgestalt-explainers, with the lobes of gods like batteries charging the lightningfork and discourse of their iambics; or the stately, convolute Modernist epics taking us by either anthro- and psycho- logical hand through the filedrawered corridors of our learning; or, of course, the anonymous…
The man next door broods over fences While the trees in his yard are bent double. He stands like that at the window. Mumbling about wives with dust in their noses Who nudge the soil of their pen for grub. They know the scenery never changes, The sun harsh as a fender. His wife has…
Driving from coast to coast down looped highways, I notice how the future we have been speeding towards for years is receding behind us. We must have crossed some boundary and hardly noticed; people we once hurried to greet are standing along the roadside waving goodbye, your grandfather in his ancestral cap, my mother holding…
My father, in a 1956 gray suit, had the jungle in his tie, a macaw on Kelly green. But today is Saturday, no briefs to prepare, and he's in a T-shirt. I sit on his lap with my ABC Golden Book, and he orders the letters to dance. The A prancing red as an apple….
It's been empty for a number of years, cracked in a hundred places by the chill and thaw of the seasons. Now a smelly, thick, green water fills its deeper end where large, mottled frogs, before they ascend from their mire, lay their eggs—a jelly that hovers like the dark dream of a will- ful…
I am five, Wading out into the deep Sunny grass, Unmindful of snakes & yellowjackets, out To the yellow flowers Quivering in sluggish heat. Don't mess with me 'Cause I have my Lone Ranger Six-shooter. I can hurt You with questions Like silver bullets. The tall flowers in my dreams are…
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…
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