Poetry

Remember how you took me down to the dock in Michigan one night to show me stars, your latest hobby: the air was like ink, blue-black, and shadowless. The lamplight that we carried made the narrow boards bob at our feet, the small water warbling on either side. With the light out, lying on our…

1 Edges: as a ditch defending a field, a rim of water spelling out an island. 2 Close-up: tall blades of grass, two seed stalks (stripped umbrella ribs) arrange a landscape. Foreground, the fringed black fungus splits, asymetrical      as love, its three-inch mandala a diagram on black. Across the black wound, widenings uncover something like…

On a narrow street without a sign in New Haven, outside the apartment of the well-known critic, stands his royal blue sports car with the key in the ignition. The world knows his magnanimity and he has never been unkind to me. He won't mind my taking a little spin. He must be napping and…

A souvenir of this. If the moss and lichen stains Come clean, it may seem even too abstract, Not just the way old glass ages, but in that it contains What contained it, and was saved intact Knowing which side-valley we are in might Tell the story — a US medicine Jar, Or Japanese inkwell….

I’ve lost my only pair of glasses; without them, I’m practically blind and so my cadaverous optomitrist signals me into his dim office. “Have a seat,” he says. He means the chair with all the apparatus. But he’s pointing somewhere else— as if I should sit on the floor or maybe at his desk, gazing…

     When all the other trees are bare, why do those last few oak leaves cling up there            under the cold blue sky?            Don't they know when to die?      And to think: after the long freeze, when warmth revives and fills these empty trees            with the green stuff of spring,            they'll still…

You say, acting on it, and then You feed me wild strawberries dunked In creme fraiche, which you picked. And if you were younger, and once We were younger, and if bitter Thirst had not cloyed the thing, We say, acting on it, and if These strawberries and this one rose You picked last now,…

“The poem is the present which you can't define.” — Henry Miller Fortunately, it is daytime. A woman walks by, adjusts the neckline on her daughter's dress, continues. A station wagon passes. Cleo, a Doberman, measures her yard in long strides. The wind soothes the walls of the houses, the air-conditioners cool. Trees move. With…

Madam, this is a prayer-ring from Tibet: a tiny bell to rouse the god, three silver thunderbolts, seven grains of gold. And in the center, see, an emerald, lightless, dark. . . I had it from a lama's chela whose master sent him to buy food. Here there are many beggars from the hills. You…