Poetry

driving down East avenue towards downtown cardinal swooping over the car, horsechestnut flowers erect & white.      I told Jay at the bank I saw horsechestnuts in flower over the weekend, she said, “I remember when I was little we used to gather the nuts, now you don’t find them any more.” She went on but…

When I was a child of four or five, I fell out of my parents’ car one day, and they drove off and left me. I went to sleep weeping in the ditch. Later my mother came by at ten at night, and nudged me with her rhinocerous horn, found me dead, or still alive,…

It is Spring Already you relax in a cotton skirt Passing thru the mountains is a strong feeling Fields plowed, new wood split, the hawk floating Puffs of softwood in the grey hills A river runs with snowmelting A small bridge neatly built to get by There is a pleasure in such places The old…

What if we had never married, what if just before the wedding, foreseeing the pain we would cause each other, we broke it off, goodbye. I see us meeting again after 10 years, each of us married to people we like but don’t love;      there is a deep, sober longing in your eyes, an airy…

     The stump stands where it is easily overlooked until you come close. It is the size of a gray cannonbarrel, pointed up. Or an elephant’s leg with the body shot off. Where bark is gone, something sleek and silvery shows, as when one glimpses an intestine. The stump feels rough to the fingers as a…

March comes and water moves The river, ponds, brooks open On snowshoes this is the last week You’ll hike down these banks of Rotten snow, the last week bridges Of ice will be there to criss-cross Down stream, the last week the Deer carcass will be pinned between Rocks and white water spray Thru the…

Darius Milhaud, last of les six, advised      me (his final day in Paris, from his highly polished            black and chrome wheelchair, gaunt, arthritic, a worn angel under his      uninsured Légers the Germans had left behind) the most                        delicious roasted chicken that he ever ate was cooked up by      Brancusi, in the…

Just outside Oberlin Ohio old John Deeres pull wagon loads of wheat into the sticky afternoon. Combines the size of elephants roll into the long fields and begin to feed. This is a day of dull surprises, a cut on the hand, sunburn on the back of the neck. And in the wheat, grasshoppers aware…

to Barry Spacks The poet is reading a novel. One line, then another line, they are all linked! It’s all in there — “The German columns advancing like banks of clouds!” They make a sense which escapes him. That brother who was left behind with an uncle in the third chapter turns up now, trying…