Poetry

I'm a mortgage man and I live on commissions, so this morning's couple, newlyweds, already make the day seem long — the husband ready to question every signature. The wife looks like Mary in Simone Martini's “Annunciation” frowning and gathering her frock as if Gabriel were an unexpected guest, his rippling cape suggesting he was…

The gypsies should have gotten me, wrapped me in sheets the way they snapped silverware from cabinets. Sleeving a stewing rooster, they would come up the countryside in red convertibles and park stretched along the shoulder like those exotic garter snakes an aunt of mine would catch, lay by a step to tease her brothers….

Forty years later she is still the girl Who lusted after Paris from the Left Bank, And called from Montmartre, Where is Paris? The boulevards did not convince her; Those Frenchmen and women Marched like a scene from a film, Black-and-white, moving unevenly, A little grainy. In no bistro, in no Metro station Was the…

For Aunt Hope Overhung by evergreen, your house was cool Those afternoons the sun's long ghost shimmered In the fading curtains. The rocker's senile Back and forth wore ruts in the floor, the boards' Soft creaking wheezing in, out. It's seven years Since I saw you for the last time, Your eyes molten with remembrance's…

My second year on First Street, my twentieth year from home, the house that I was born in is still my house in dreams, so that, just now, waking, I have to feel my way along the bedroom wall to find my door and light switch. And no one from this town or any town…

It is fitting for the son To go out searching, To look for his life Along treeless interstates, In dull industrial cities, In towns sucked dry by the wind And circled by farms Called Stony, Bleak, Hungry, Desolation; He thinks of a hillside pasture Under the rain. He thinks of pitching a tent Near an…

For my grandmother The cars flashed like scales as the hearse-headed snake Crawled down the dusty lane to the funeral tent Flapping dove-gray wings in the wind-stropped heat. I saw you snug in the hearse's air-conditioned gut And imagined your eyes opening, staring Through the cloud of velvet lining the brass lid, Your thunder-gray pupils…

My maple didn't turn this fall to red or gold; its withered leaves just paled to jaundiced green and fell. Now I'm raking wildly to meet the vacuum sweeper crawling up my street, where piles of neighbor's leaves from rainbow colored oaks, catalpas, tulip poplars lie neatly stacked at curbside. For neighbors understood the meaning…

In another time, I could look outside With a kind of white envy, An endlessly impatient gaze. The sunny lawns, the line of houses With triangular porches, A neighbor's long-handled shovel— I admired these things For their simple vanity: A gift of function and place. And all that I saw seemed a kind of temptation—…