Poetry

     A woman prepared a mouse for her husband’s dinner, roasting it with a blueberry in its mouth.     At table he uses a dentist’s pick and a surgeon’s scalpel, bending over the tiny roastling with a jeweler’s loupe . . .      Twenty years of this: curried mouse, garlic and butter mouse, mouse sauteed in its…

The front a mirror. The back a picture of the Garden of Eden. A strange find of the old master of glass.

My daughter gives me her treasure, a stone-glass bead. And I give her my treasure — I accept her stone-glass bead.

    An elephant went to bed and pulled a crazy quilt up under its tusks.     But just as the great gray head began filling with the gray wrinkles of sleep it was awakened by the thud of its tail falling out of bed.     Would you get my tail? said the elephant to another…

These calm days of September with their sun. It’s time to harvest. There are still clumps of cranberries in the woods, reddening rosehips by the stone walls, hazel nuts coming loose, and clusters of black berries shine in the bushes, thrushes look around for the last currants and wasps fasten on to the sweetening plums….

This lake is not a concept but the home of fishes. Slowly the ducks go by. The Christ is not a concept but one of these ducks. Which one?

A child was taught To be a gravedigger. Pail and plastic shovel Waiting on the meadow. Don’t leave for tomorrow What you can do today! A bit of daylight still left Among the evening configurations. With his stooped shoulders He looks employed in the obvious way: Dark, damp clods of earth flying . . ….

We will not find you by going back to London, not even in another heat-wave of the century, the fire-bells ringing peacefully in the empty buildings all day Sunday. . . or the floor-through room above Earl’s Court, already otherworldly: two or three chairs; worm-eaten dark scrollwork around the Jacobean mirror; the chest with a…

The baseball is also known as the fruit whereby man lost his innocence. No one shouts, “Throw the old peach.” It is the Old Apple and when the air here greens and violets dab purple, while the leaves still keep their pure forms before ravenous generations of insect commence to ravage, the Apple is thrown….