Poetry

My envy of people my age or older whose parents both are living frequently, alas, takes the form of contempt. First, the parents are old. Old and bald and fat and slow or old and ill or at the very least mothers like what their daughters fear themselves to become, fathers blinking owlish at the…

Put no trust in nothing, not even yourself Yesterday was like summer, today snow blows I’ve walked six miles with an axe and wedge Actually make my living near a river that runs bright water Home to a small hawk found mangled in the woodshed Eyes opening, I load my rifle but won’t use it…

     ”I’ll meet you under the clock.” When, set loose like children Kept in through the long winter, Spring finally came, And the old hotel seemed theirs, all New York, Each moment announcing its presents, Fresh, self-invigorating pleasures To be sought out again and again, As if eyes and brains and nerves Can only absorb so…

Beneath the fabric of leaves, sycamore, beech, black oak, in the slow residual movement of the pool;            in the current braiding over the wedged branch, and pouring from the ledge, urgent, lyric,                  the source marshalls every motion to the geometric plunder of rock — arranging a socket of water, a cold estate…

The day’s too beautiful; The Spring sun on the porch too warm . . . He’s restless; nothing can contain him — Not his books, or a whole house full of toys, Not even the hidden fortress he’s built Deep in his grandmother’s garden — For this is his special day. His secret love is…

The widow refuses sleep, for sleep pretends that it can bring him back. In this way, the will is set against the appetite. Even the empty hand moves to the mouth. Apart from you, I turn a corner in the city and find, for a moment, the old climate, the little blue flower everywhere.

“But it’s only a cigarette lighter . . .” — Offering From the guarded hand of a twelve year old Whose father is unable to start the briquets. Oppressive July, the first of two weeks at the lake. Whosh! The flames leap up as the family scatters. “If you have a cigarette lighter I’ve got…

It is a foreign symmetry, unlike anything in the earth’s surface rubble — the headstones, grouped by family to organize the sacred rows; the flowers at the fresh site are forced blooms with exposed glands of pollen and the widest throats; even the neat packages of food, each container marked with the names of the…

They’re determined to have fun. The boy’s 14 today. He’s chosen this trip North to where they lived a life before him. There’s the attic in the gray Victorian where pigeons nested until the cooing wasn’t cute. Where the husband put his fist — why? — through the wall. The owners’ fights rose through forced-air…