Poetry

    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….

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…