Poetry

The slow light coming on, And sudden wind, dry heat And no dove song. I look up From whatever I have been All night thoughtfully reading, From the dim abstractions That crowd a table at dawn, And I hear my named called — A low, insistent sound — Though no one is here. All night…

Each year is like a snake that swallows its tail. How long since we have learned, of seasons, the paradigm? We know how cloud- scud and scut, north-bred, come      scouting The land out for winter, its waiting bulk. Come      skirmishing, flanking. Then red leaf, gold leaf, the winter's choked road. Spring Brings hope, even if…

I can’t pick up the vacuum cleaner without remembering our most subtle and tender moments, shooing the sniper from the playground, then picking watermelons. For the past few months my life has read like canned food labels caked with panic. I don’t know if she’s still in Tokyo or on her way to Zanzibar. I…

Those good students who only loved working through pages of exercises, but were too good to object to the philanthropy of physical recreation took a bus to the Grand Concourse and another one down it, modelled after the Champs Elysees in Paris France, to the aging YMHA by Yankee Stadium. We stumbled on the basketball…

Clouds clamber, turgid, the mountain, peakward And pine-pierced, toward the Vulgar and flaming apocalypse of day, In which our errors are consumed Like fire in a lint-house — not repetitious But different each day, for day to day nothing Is identical to eye or soul. At night, at a late hour, I Have asked stars…

Is it me there in the young clerk at the Circle-K, holding the neck of an invisible guitar, whose rock music rises above the explosions of a Star Wars game? Or am I standing, years before, stoned in front of a band, working frets, revving strings? Something flashes in the cash register’s bluish green digits,…

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…

The figured wheel rolls through shopping malls and      prisons, Over farms, small and immense, and the rotten little      downtowns. Covered with symbols, it mills everything alive and grinds The remains of the dead in the cemeteries, in unmarked      graves and oceans. Sluiced by salt water and fresh, by pure and contaminated      rivers, By snow and…