Poetry

  • Piano Night

    The phonograph comes on stitched with insect life, breathing the slurred breath of the grasses. I hear the cooling earth send off the random clicks of its shut-down engine as firefly embers tick upwards through the trees and loose in the drowned world of the grass: a rattle, a scuffle, the little ball bearing in…

  • Veterans Day, 1981

    In last week’s New York Times I read the First Lady’s announcement from the White House: a joke writer was hired until it all blew over, the enemy’s cheap shots about expensive gowns and china. Appease your critics with a laugh, she said. Disarm them. Meanwhile the paper’s full of arms deals. “Capability” is spread…

  • Genesis 1-2:4

    In the beginning, God made HEAVEN and EARTH. The earth without form was waste. DARKNESS was the face of the deep. His spirit was the wind brooding over the waters. *     *      * In darkness he said,                -LET THERE BE LIGHT. There was light. In light he said, IT IS GOOD. God, dividing darkness from light,…

  • At Half Century

         ”And look, Daedalus still      hasn’t invented      the wings.”            Miroslav Holub Somewhere, a gardener translates the labyrinth into a maze of hawthorne and yew, and though the minotaur sleeps, the hawthorne is sharp as a rosebush, the yewberries are bright with poison. It is evening. I have watched the children wander off into their lives,…

  • In the Hospital For Tests

    A dripping, numbing girl, surf tearing her In half, stands in monstrous silhouette Before a phallus of plate-glass Smeared with the sun’s endless honey. This is the kind of place where dying could be easy, The dazzle of the ocean like the flashbulbs of paparazzi. Or else you lose yourself in this wilderness of dots:…

  • Remission

    It seems you must grow into your death slowly, as if it were a pair of new shoes waiting on the closet floor, smelling of the animal it came from, but still too big too stiff for you to wear. Meanwhile you dance barefoot your shaky dance of pretence, and we dance with you, the…

  • Back

    I know I’m here because these are my hands upon my knees. My eyes that stare at wallpaper I put up six years ago. These bones that lie across the old green couch and tremble during the ten o’clock news, my bones. This is the way my ancestor-Irish-farmers felt, coming in from the fields at…

  • The Walk

    “Don’t go so fast,” I called, but my father always forgot. Helpless, I reached to clutch his coattails until his hand surrounded mine and towed me on. What knowledge of me did his hand record? What angers were given to my childish keeping — to await this instant, years later, when I’m reproached: “Go slow.”…

  • Vintage Clothes

    I saw a man in the neighborhood, the neighborhood of my life. Walking, a charming smile — grey jacket, and thought, Do I know that face? It was the old gray jacket I liked, its careless retrograde chic. By little things, our fancy moves. I took a few walks with him. And all fall, yellow…