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…

Dream ended, I went out, awake To new snow fallen in the dark, Stainless on road and field; no track Lay yet on all my day of work. I heard the wild ones muttering, Assent their dark arrival made At dawn, gray dawn on dawn-gray wing Outstretched, shadowless in that shade, Down from high distances…

But I love you also in slow, dim-witted ways; we pass the slow afternoon hibernating together . . . one or two words spoken, and tears run down. The quivering wings of the winter ant wait so for winter to end; and there are tidal creatures who know whether the other is there or not;…

The fountain around the soldiers’ and sailors’ monument, the mist from the splashing water, the Murat theater; it was there I waited for the young man I loved, hour after hour. Often he would not come. I leaned against the walls of a candy shop, boxes of rubber chocolates in the window, behind me buses…