Poetry

Put no trust in nothing, not even yourself Yesterday was like summer, today snow blows I’ve walked six miles with an axe and wedge Actually make my living near a river that runs bright water Home to a small hawk found mangled in the woodshed Eyes opening, I load my rifle but won’t use it…

     ”I’ll meet you under the clock.” When, set loose like children Kept in through the long winter, Spring finally came, And the old hotel seemed theirs, all New York, Each moment announcing its presents, Fresh, self-invigorating pleasures To be sought out again and again, As if eyes and brains and nerves Can only absorb so…

Beneath the fabric of leaves, sycamore, beech, black oak, in the slow residual movement of the pool;            in the current braiding over the wedged branch, and pouring from the ledge, urgent, lyric,                  the source marshalls every motion to the geometric plunder of rock — arranging a socket of water, a cold estate…

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…