Poetry

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…

Because he sometimes bored himself with thought my father taught himself things. Or because he was an American man, and back from Saipan, married early, stuck in a stupid job for the kids, and farm-chores after that. Or it may have been a kind of silent booze, he was so silent: sitting in the chair…

This chorus girl was pensive, Sadness was on her brow, Till she met her Sugar Daddy, And she's ex-pensive now! —from a Varga queen of hearts When Mister Mulryan called me into his office to “show me something,” I was lucky— all he flashed was playing cards, nude women in white cowboy hats, one with…

If time is our sickness, dearest, health in the flesh would be a rare visit. I could believe it. Today when you called at five in the morning to say Delta flight seven. . .arrive. . .depart. . . I was already dreaming your voice. What I needed was your information. When you arrive it…

Apocryphal, the sweet Hawaiians, a few blue clouds like silk hooked on the shark-tooth Waianes, root-smell hanging in the rain forest, Honolulu damp with flowers: torchy African tulip, St. Thomas trees like giant, sorry, missionary lilacs, night-blooming cereus that have had their night, that shrivel at dawn like yellow sea-anemone a child collected on a…