Years ago, in a plane over California, I suddenly thought I understood Keats’ sonnet “When I have fears that I may cease to be . . .” I felt changed by the experience, both thrilled and calmed. At the time I worked as a “gofer” for a small film company. IBM was flying us around…
There lay behind her clothes, in her spacious closet, a hidden sanctuary, a Chinese fortress. Emperors abdicated to paint moments: under willows a brief calm ensued at a ferry-landing; three travellers with a gray pony waited on an angle of land for the ferry, to the left, in hazy sunlight, and farther to the left,…
The moon’s heavy With too many questions It hangs above us And does its business Though the light is in darkness You and I see it And look out Wanting to be shown more What’s inside what’s around the dream But the light is in darkness Often at Madagascar Could you trust The wicked music…
The derelict who lives on our street looks like Whitman as a young man; this summer he slept discreetly in a greasy bundle of rags by the alley trash cans. Now autumn’s here and at night he sprawls in the warm, sugary gust vented from the candy store. * * * I sat on the wharf’s…
And if I respect in her a deliberate beauty, that of an owl’s matted pellets fallen to the roots beneath its nest, more in her than perhaps is, where an unassuming friend of mine, not I, asks for her hand, then in the succession of pines to hardwoods, in generations, in once-hunted bones falling from…
Spell the speil of cause and effect, Ride the long rail of fact after fact; What curled the plume in the drake’s tail And put the white ring round his neck?
Grace on which we fix our gaze; pillar of light that is her lithe, gymnast’s body. You and I have already crossed the threshold on which she pauses— how beautiful the naked foot poised in air. We’ve already entered the sexual dark and now stare back at her, still standing there as if she could…
The habit of you lying next to me was so strong that for a year I slept with pillows on your side of the bed. When I turned in my sleep I put my arms around them or as I often had before, I turned away with my back against them; this habit of tides…
Dream ended, I went out, awake To new snow fallen in the dark, Stainless on road and field; no track Lay yet on all my day of work. I heard the wild ones muttering, Assent their dark arrival made At dawn, gray dawn on dawn-gray wing Outstretched, shadowless in that shade, Down from high distances…
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