Poetry

These hills I scaled, once glass mountains now slope gently down toward school. Returned at last I walk these streets eyeing every inch. Stiff laundry hangs from tenement lines, stairways zig-zag to a door: Danny, Margaret, Jane — their sister from a foster home visited on the way to Holy First Communion dressed in white,…

after reading Ibuse's Black Rain Brought low in Kyoto too sick with chills and fever to take the bullet train to Hiroshima I am jolted out of this geography pursued by Nazis, kidnapped, stranded when the dam bursts, my life always in someone else's hands. Room service brings me tea and aspirin. This week the…

You will sit like a scholar, inclined as if to hear, not fidgeting because it's not time to shift the legs another way, and there's a long way to go still. On the desk a silver ink-pot, unused but indicative, a gift from colleagues, students, wife, friends, gleams beyond the ellipse of light and the…

When Father clinked his plate on Sunday afternoons, scraping collars of fat into an oily pile, Tiger would struggle to his feet, and stagger over slowly, smiling, snout lifted, his lips parted. My mother joked the first few times but then she left the room and left it every Sunday, so little my father could…

Here 40 years ago on moonless nights pilots cut their engines and Allies parachuted down. I know from movies the farmer's lantern, the password. In July now, irrigation sprays fan the fields with light, tiny mirrors that rise, arc, shatter the heat-stunned afternoon. Along the unswerving road someone has planted roses—for miles, alternate sides the…

The cathedral sticks up out of the gray mountain Like the raw knuckles of a fist at the end of an arm Or, since this is Mexico, an emaciated elephant At a circus. Surrounded by soda pop and flies Half of him is peeling pastels and crumbling graffiti In scrambled egg scallops, with people buzzing…

One of my presents, one Christmas, was a Golden Treasury of Archaeology, a book almost too big for my hands, its cover illustrated with masks from Sumer and a terraced ziggurat. The book's heaviness suggested it contained a secret weight: I stared into it, sure that some subtext buried like foundations would come clear. Heinrich…

— April, 1945 This soldier, this boy who moves through the innocent trees, does he regret the man he half-pushes, half-carries? The Rhine — simply another battle, a collage of mines, the human spasm: hands, hearts lost to maggots in the undergrowth. He marches on a thin gravel road, his footfall, meagre. A dung beetle…

Such wonderful tales leap, tongue-tied, from these broken names then vanish, one by one. Now morning's vanished too; each cracked stone tablet sheathes itself in noon's broad band of light — this clear, cold light, the special      province of one anxious, backward glance. Lost stories fill the ear's one      room with other rooms—all empty, room…