Poetry

For too long I’ve watched the ski boat scan the water the way a gull might pan for fish. What’s a ski boat? I don’t know exactly, and I’ve never heard of one discussed on those dogged New England wharfs. But the boat has spindly legs which keeps its frame from touching ocean like a…

The boy, missing the city intensely at this moment, Mopes and sulks at the window. There's the first owl now,      quite near, But the boy hardly notices. And the kerosene lamp Goes on sputtering, giving off vague medicinal fumes That make him think of sick-rooms. He has been memorizing ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol,’ but…

I stare into the glass-paned kitchen door to see a slight girl stuffing fruitcake in her mouth. She jerks with fright. I lean over a tin of World Famous Fruitcake and the world leans out: a woman eats from her cupped hand, over the sink while far away in wonder the aging boy who axe-murdered…

The thick humidity means nothing, my nostalgia even less. The dip and throaty call of goldfinch and oriole, fallen blooms strewn on the ground commemorate the ease of mere detail. But that strong and lingering scent distracts me from the tree-lined road to a saddled mare and her foal taking boys through their paces in…

The road is a hard road,      and the river is wadded and flattened out Due west of Santa Maria dell'Ortolo. Each morning I drove with its steady breathing right to my right, Dawn like a courtier With his high white hat just coming into the room, Ponte Pietra cut in the morning gauze,            …

They play ferociously to beat the rain, my youngest neighbors shrieking in the yard. “Can you do this?” And Randolph dives into the dirt. His friend goes wild. “Can you do this? Can you do this?” she sings, dragging her bony knees along the dust. Some wise child’s chalked in green on the Giant wall,…

I’d seen it only once, the scar I told my childhood friends my father got at war. A jagged scrawl, like a hurt remark, a lost island on his thigh. He never told me if a woman’s kiss left its imprint there, or if it caused him pain when strangers stopped to stare. But when…

with André Frénaud I                              Pull out the pissed-on clinkers,                  Rake down the ashes of my bed, and come in                        And let's do it, as cold as we can get,                              Calving into the void like glaciers            Into the green Northern sea. Give…

Good Professor, I’m glad you weren’t my father! The little gods and demons fall in across your desk like infantry — Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan toys, spanning two millennia. Some wear hats with horns, others horned helmets. Athletic satyrs and jackal-headed women stand uniformly muscular. The old in robes, larger, watch us, smiling, satisfied they’ve outlived…