Poetry

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…

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…

It's their not knowing how they must die. The emptiness of their beautiful eyes. The heat and damp and pulse of their breaths, the way joy seizes them like a miniature death— and no shame in it.

I don't know if I have lost as much as you but last night I lay awake listening to the pipes purl on and this old house give and wheeze, leaving port for who knows where. You probably know all about lying awake, the recommended counting backwards, the dark which is empty which is forgetting…

—on the film by Jean Renoir My wife says they might be Laurel and Hardy: the thin, future son-in-law, Anatole, and the fat father of his Henriette, who clown with fishing poles at the river's edge. Pike! the fat one says. And the thin one—Did you say: the shark that lives in fresh water? Cuts…