Poetry

Truly the dead float there, though we cannot see them they bathe their arms in the blue, near the shore for it is not true the sky has no shore though sometimes it is only gauze, unrolling length by blue length as when we were children we stood in the store, in the musty corner…

Here in purgatory bare ground is visible, except in shady places where snow prevails. Still, each day sees the restoration of another animal: a sparrow, just now a sleepy wasp; and, at twilight, the skunk pokes out of the den, anxious for mates and meals. . . . On the floor of the woodshed the…

They appeared on the beach as I walked by, the bodies, sprawling on towels immodestly, impervious to stares by what integrity they owned which let them abandon their winter clothes. As they lay in the street, I watched them and followed a man’s search for his wife: a familiar shape and texture, perfume rising from…

It’s visitor’s day At the end of the night As a mirror keeps hurrying Another wedding through the moon The survivors looking back with satin or top hats . . . Scraps of the calendar Fill the dull air The altar of the hospital Dim as lamps in wartime It’s December again The year gods…

Years ago, in a plane over California, I suddenly thought I understood Keats’ sonnet “When I have fears that I may cease to be . . .” I felt changed by the experience, both thrilled and calmed. At the time I worked as a “gofer” for a small film company. IBM was flying us around…

There lay behind her clothes, in her spacious closet, a hidden sanctuary, a Chinese fortress. Emperors abdicated to paint moments: under willows a brief calm ensued at a ferry-landing; three travellers with a gray pony waited on an angle of land for the ferry, to the left, in hazy sunlight, and farther to the left,…

The moon’s heavy With too many questions It hangs above us And does its business Though the light is in darkness You and I see it And look out Wanting to be shown more What’s inside what’s around the dream But the light is in darkness Often at Madagascar Could you trust The wicked music…

The derelict who lives on our street looks like Whitman as a young man; this summer he slept discreetly in a greasy bundle of rags by the alley trash cans. Now autumn’s here and at night he sprawls in the warm, sugary gust vented from the candy store. *     *      * I sat on the wharf’s…

And if I respect in her a deliberate beauty, that of an owl’s matted pellets fallen to the roots beneath its nest, more in her than perhaps is, where an unassuming friend of mine, not I, asks for her hand, then in the succession of pines to hardwoods, in generations, in once-hunted bones falling from…