Poetry

  • A Bouquet on the Third Day

    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…

  • Little Elegy for Gay

    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…

  • What I Know about the Eye

    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:…

  • The Afterlife

    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…

  • Listening

    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…

  • Portraits

    It's not the chapel bell at Arles, only a doorbell rung on television, but it's enough to send the dog in a scurry and yapping to the front door where no one is. I'm not Gauguin, at least not now, the isle of Tahiti has disappeared into the ether of possibility, and the girls, too….

  • Tomorrow, Today

    Coming into the home stretch—but what’s home? A couple of years before he died, Ray got stung by a bee and his heart nearly stopped. Previous stings hadn’t bothered him. Now he became allergic to gluten, milk, fruit. He broke out at a look, had problems breathing. Women get menopause. Men pause, then fall. Another…

  • Big Red Fish

    I have to sympathize with the child. The mother has changed clothes twice, nothing seems right tonight, nothing fits, not even the moon between those two trees, it's simply too big, too fat, too angry to stay put. The other woman has skinny legs and a face like rain. So I have to sympathize with…