Poetry

A funny thing happened last night, Betty-Lou. We were out celebrating Willie's promotion at the plant, having a grand old time. Candlelight, champagne, roses, a hundred-dollar dinner at The Palace. You won't believe how fast it came over him. A finger snap. A cornered look on his face when a Vietnamese waitress walked over to…

It was a way to toy with the warning against playing in the woods at evening, the winner being the one whose bike glided in farthest, riderless, before crashing. They all would coast down the three-block hill with their legs tucked under and feet on the seats, then leap where the road ends abruptly at…

We are not mentioned by others, never greeted by friends. We return to a place and follow a mystery to its little hole. The sky had no imprint, it rained the way ink drips off newspapers, and we hid behind that year as if behind a blank billboard. Perhaps a cold observer could have written…

“. . . half-lit with whiskey“ — Seamus Heaney half with wit and this long night is illuminated for its full many hours. My friend is this bottle; and my friend is raising her glass. Here's to you, bottle and friends, glowing with the compassion adequate liquor brings us. No work tomorrow; and no one…

The South China Sea drives in its herd of wild blue horses. We go at the volleyball like a punchingbag: Clem's already lost a tooth & Johnny's got a kisser closing his left eye. Frozen airlifted steaks burn on a wire grill, & miles away we hear machineguns go crazy. Pretending we're somewhere else, we…

The last birds rush, shadowless, through evening's thick, sweet light — color of honey, color of the pine of our paneled ceiling, beneath which I drowse too soon, beneath which I wake at dawn unable to recall my dreams, and lie for my five minutes staring at the pine's knots, hurling the mind's useless hatcher…

“Illness is a long lane. . .” —John Keats I can't forgive an old theme in spring. Powdered aspirin on the lips of white lillies, the antiseptic color injected in these lawns reminds me of a beautiful illness but I can't imagine coming down with it. I'm out walking in a mood; it shames me…

(L.K.) Can't you tell me when or where you'll be here or there, now and then? Water laps at Crete as you leave it, then turns around Cape Cod as you land on these American shores. On the Gulf down here the sun strikes me as Aegean—remember the algae spreading on the pond each year…

Today my bicycle spoke, tomorrow I doubt we will ever meet again. On the blankness of this plain, I've stepped up one fortunate wish: to explode the circle of denial, as it explodes itself daily, by finer and finer detail. This whole departure looks bigger than my truest fantasy: riding shirtless through a certain reformatory,…