Poetry

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…

“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.”…

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…

— for my father I want to do this right, as though there were a right way of walking or sitting still, of staring at stoplights changing or the wincing new moon which, after all, doesn’t care what metaphors we make of it — even a right way to smoke, to hold a cup. I…

Spring is contained in the chill snow egg of nature. Its coiling green can’t figure out how to die. From my upstairs window I can make out, even at midnight twelve different steeples needling the sky, and white barn roofs, trapezoids, pitches, mansards, all simplified because all snowy — through white lace curtains. There’s more…

My new friend is away for the weekend—the weekend drags by. I want to know exactly what he’s doing. Is the convention exciting? Who are the new people? Is Atlanta as pretty as they say? I’m eager to hear all about it. — What’s he doing now? The weekend drags by. My best friend has…

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…

On the second day of Three Mile Island Annie and I drove southwest at sunset to visit her family in Connecticut. The sun was large and red and hazy and it was easy to imagine the sun was angry. Traffic going our way was fairly thick — all heading more or less toward Pennsylvania. Lemmings,…

           translated by the author and Robert Pinsky I walk those corridors by torchlight Hearing water trickle down onto broken slabs. Deep into the mountain. In niches, busts of my friends, Their eyes are of marble. Only the light and shadow Throw over their faces a brief sour grimace of life. So, further into the…