Out of the old noon sun still lifting wraiths from morning's gully, the phoebe's call assails the barn— its shingles are nearer the heart of gray in the shadows of those deep eaves. Summer, the huckster, wends over Blinn's Hill, having sold snippets of blue thread, a needle, some ribbon, perhaps a pan…
* As soon as the full-blown bubble leaves the hand and breaks, we are back in the Keatsian vale of soul-making, having to do it all over again. Cabbages, stones, clods of bound earth—unpromising material with which to start, but better, perhaps, than waiting for divinity. The soul is no homunculus, crouching inside with unfledged…
That was the summer I used the Duino Elegies in all of my seductions, taking Rilke from my briefcase the way another man might break out candlelight and wine. I think Rilke would have understood, would have thought the means justified the ends, when I began to read in a voice so low it forced…
but you sent me back to Turkey, and the town was Canakkale, or was it Kusadasi, no, Canakkale with my first sight of a Turkish street, of Turkish women wrapped to their eyes, and on the streets (I was high on a bus on the way to Troy) were all those small “cathedrals,” carried by…
On Monday she washed, On Tuesday she ironed, On Wednesday she visited her father, carrying seven starched shirts, a basket of folded underclothes, and a complete dinner in foil. On Thursday she cleaned, On Friday she shopped, On Saturday she handed nails to my father, who swore at her slowness. On Sunday she took a…
Charles and I go out together in his boat, which is a cat- amaran, in the burnishing weather, elated. so it's not surprising that in his boat, which is a cat at top speed among cats, this poem begins. Elated. so it's not surprising that we sing “Speed Bonnie Boat” to the winds. At top…
Remember when we were introduced to the only man in Oregon who had seen Diomeda cauta, the White-Capped Albatross also known as Shy, whose normal range is deep air deep off the continental shelf, and spoke of the Harlequin Duck, of Histrionicus histrionicus: Rather small, he said; mostly silent. You looked at him strangely. He…
When I eat crab, slide the rosy rubbery claw across my tongue I think of my mother. She'd drive down to the edge of the Bay, tiny woman in a huge car, she'd ask the crab-man to crack it for her. She'd stand and wait as the pliers broke those chalky homes, wild- red and…
With your silent, slender hand you put out stars. You give away my name like a bee does honey. Bite into me! You ignite my eyes. A distant sea of buffaloes in the green, ashen air. The taste is replaceable, I am not. Nailed to the cross, I spend your fruit. And look—every drop of…
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