Poetry

Intelligence moves me, I am moved by first movement as a soul is moved to enter body, as a star, possessed of mind, burns passionless for many lifetimes, as a tree does meditate continually, branches driven upward unceasingly by first movement, leaves driven to sing with fluent urgency of water, wind, and light, as I…

A hanging fat rabbit leaks in the pantry, and the ants with rifles march to battle. Grapes in the still life go rotten. El Greco painted for the sixteenth century then, for a long time, for no one; now, in the twentieth, there's an El Greco again. Also sixteenth century, his hand on his hip,…

Wherever you are, the coast is tumbled stone, And there in the clearing is a white-tailed deer. Listening a moment to these words alone, Perhaps you will believe the silence here. This morning as I stand still on the lawn An owl halloos somewhere beyond the meadow, Beyond the boundary, and then is gone. The…

We assume the connubial pose you lying propped up on pillows me, on the edge, asking for answers. I strike you dumb. Trap you in my constructions. Your nightmare whinnies in the stall. We settle it like men and women do. Behind the kiss, your teeth screen for a test I cannot pass. Behind your…

Lying beneath a pitch pine whose stacked branches touch nothing, four o'clock comes. Two crows, a red spider, a cardinal and mosquitoes come. Rain comes. And as if the grey fox bolting down cornbread we left for racoons weren't enough, I come arched on a fine wreck of a crazy quilt as his tongue kicks…

     and she sighs, so vulnerable, but for a flowered scarf double­ tied under her chin. Sunrise, a pink wash, blushes before turning to bottle-fly, butterfly, the blue in robin's egg blue. It's 1944. There's no end to freight cars, troup cars across the lap of flatland, stars on front porch windows. What, she wonders, might…

With not so much as bootstraps it shinnies up a snowdrop arrives in this white icebox its head trembling from the effort to hang on. Slicker than a guillotine the icicle above it honed by the abrasive sun.

Death makes its sweep over the grass, wind rolled in leaves, a torn wing. Get rid of these cups and saucers, the transistor, the pattern-rugs, this dull heap of necessities I saved up for once. Recycle the poems, clean off the margins of these books, give them back to the poor from whom they came….

Why do the people running from the bomber slow down, look back, and up? Instinct, is it, or a need to glimpse death before it picks you off? What I am seeing must be correct though I can't believe my eyes. Yet, this is docudrama: Poland, WW II, the exodus from village to Warsaw. Surely…