Poetry

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….

While Marquis De Sade had himself buggered, O just around the time the Turks Were roasting my ancestors on a spit, Goethe wrote “The Sorrows of Young Werther.” It was chilly, raw, bleak, down-at-the-mouth We were slurping bean soup with smoked sausage On 2nd Avenue where years before I saw a horse Pull a wagon…

(for Jonathan Strong) You set your hero on a sidewalk, curving vaguely, toward the floating slabs of newer buildings — or old ones, mansards; perhaps he’s just found a room      there and is very aware of where doors come in the crooking of the stairwell. You let him go in; immediately he’ll start wondering when…

The dead come, looking for their shoes. It is all right if we can’t find them: it was only the dark, inside, they wanted. It is all right. They can be the shadow of a boulder, or the oak leaves falling, one by one. There have been so many of them, and so few of…

For Michael Anania The hundred year old servants Are polishing the family silver. It’s the epoch of the porcelain pisspot, The little boy dressed as a girl. The Master is absent, evidently, And so is the elegant Madame. The Reverend still comes on Tuesdays and politely      inquires. His fingers are like teeny cupids. Even the…

Word rustles round the burying-ground, Down path and pineconed byway: The Commonwealth craves twelve heroes’ graves For a turn-lane in its highway. Town meeting night, debate is slight — Defenders of tradition Twitter and cheep, too few to keep The dead from fresh perdition. His white-hot gaze emitting rays, Selectman Ernest Earnwright: `Some stupid corpse…

It is 1929. The moon falls on the floor, the pantry is empty, beans hardening like rocks in the      cans. No, you did not expect this. The same cracked wall with its stains, odor of your mother’s cleaning fluid, curtains with their clean hems, blowing in and out. You touch the bones and lumps of…