Poetry

The day’s too beautiful; The Spring sun on the porch too warm . . . He’s restless; nothing can contain him — Not his books, or a whole house full of toys, Not even the hidden fortress he’s built Deep in his grandmother’s garden — For this is his special day. His secret love is…

The widow refuses sleep, for sleep pretends that it can bring him back. In this way, the will is set against the appetite. Even the empty hand moves to the mouth. Apart from you, I turn a corner in the city and find, for a moment, the old climate, the little blue flower everywhere.

“But it’s only a cigarette lighter . . .” — Offering From the guarded hand of a twelve year old Whose father is unable to start the briquets. Oppressive July, the first of two weeks at the lake. Whosh! The flames leap up as the family scatters. “If you have a cigarette lighter I’ve got…

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…

For Michael Anania The hundred year old servants Are polishing the family silver. It’s the epoch of the porcelain pisspot, The little boy dressed as a girl. The Master is absent, evidently, And so is the elegant Madame. The Reverend still comes on Tuesdays and politely      inquires. His fingers are like teeny cupids. Even the…

Word rustles round the burying-ground, Down path and pineconed byway: The Commonwealth craves twelve heroes’ graves For a turn-lane in its highway. Town meeting night, debate is slight — Defenders of tradition Twitter and cheep, too few to keep The dead from fresh perdition. His white-hot gaze emitting rays, Selectman Ernest Earnwright: `Some stupid corpse…