Poetry

They were laying tar on the streets today and tar on the roofs. Then the night, the unsightly stars like the pocked face of somebody, and the face must be forgiven. I sat down on the stones that are finished and I looked at the clouds that are not finished but moving on, somewhere. I…

Here is dill and its sweet scent rising off the peas steaming in their white bowl. This is the language of fiction, a picture shaped with our wits, an energy that asks our hands to cup water from the cold faucet, to wash children, to do the tasks we set for them. Here's another story…

The clockwork can no longer while daily the wind moves down the avenue. Handkerchiefs walk like hands—there is absolutely nothing I can hide from you. Already the pigeons blow up in fuliginous blooms, I have named them all Hilary. Watch, they will crowd back on the solitary timepiece. At arm's reach angels sit concerto, and…

I drive peculiar routes to come this way. Just yesterday, I coasted near to see the house accented by some candlelight at dusk, the hour when foolish dinners have begun. I didn't care. Behind an unfamiliar fence, the grave was there with all its morbid qualities unchanged. Add to this an element of rain, a…

It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand, and flies, just before its flies, the moment the rivers seem to still and stop, because a storm is coming, when there is no storm, as when a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop, very…

Of course we always want more than we have, or less: the house in Maine, all windows, and the water, like a pencil turned on its side and pressed across the page. In the dark night, we want to be a flashlight or a cool breast for a hot baby. Someone else's baby: Mozart at…

There was nothing to do on the island. The dogs chased glass lizards into the dense myrtle bush. I don’t know how the children slept. Men and women did what they could to extin­ guish the brightness of the stars.   One night my own supply of rum ran out, and I paced the verandah…

No one holds my silent mornings like a vase, the card for unhappiness represented by a single teardrop hovering over the vase. Aunt Vase, I call it, while Aunt Linda focuses on the golden sun as she centers my reading for me. But what I remember best is the snake in the grass, pronounced as…

A man comes home to find his wife in bed with the milkman. They're really going at it. The man yanks the milkman off by his heels so his chin hits the floor. Then he gets his gun. It looks like trouble for all concerned. Why is modern life so complicated? The wife and milkman…