Poetry

for E.B., 1911-1979 We had to hurry to catch the open silver train that jingled the rim of the park. It was early, Sunday, summer-hazy, and we imagined we were the only ones around: only also the quick Catalonian boys — jumped from the red hibiscus hedge, and ran along the rail, and grabbed expertly…

Beside the rocking horse, for which she has grown too large, and the shirts that hang still on the line, she looks down. The face is dour and pale with something private, and will not admit the journalist, up from Boston for country color. How well she knows these hills — green receding unaccountably to…

“Surely in a brutal job-ridden, Puritanical, Billy Grahamized America, poetry of pleasure, describing the six or seven lovely things you did that day, is a victory of sorts.” —Robert Bly For instance planting the seed called six or seven,      lovely in itself, borderline, especially considering the six or seven layers of sleep            we had…

The boats like huge bright birds sail back when someone calls them; the small campers struggle out and climb the hill to lunch. I see the last dawdler vanish in a ridge of trees. The whole valley sighs in the haze and heat of noon. Far out a fish astounds the air, falls back into…

It’s not a month for Republicans, All business, baffled inside their suits The color of moles. The wind Shakes out the blue hair of matrons Who suck their thin cheeks pale as if At the mercy of pigfeet and banjos. I’m confused too but take heart in The first crocus wobbling out Like the precarious…

— for J.H.W. The house sits like a hat too small for the bald hill newly scraped and planted with tentative grass. In the picture you took to ponder, to decide whether to buy, the poplar that plumes the ground like a giant swaying peacock feather is almost invisible, a sprouting barely alive. Scotch pine…

You call them dragonflies But you come from another country Of snow and unions, without a summer Worth the name. I passed my childhood Picking them off the wire fence That kept my father’s junkyard From my mother’s house, and bringing them Back to the concrete slab — both morgue And front porch — where…

That wine we drank all summer — a straw Moselle with a hint of hay- green to it, August and June melded, sweet as apples which do not cloy, and letting sleep come without terrors after a bottle — is unobtainable in this city. In the fall, industry takes over even the cartoon squirrels, and…

Whatever he needs, I don’t have it. Though I’m paid to bunch hay For the doe-eyed elephants and tenderize the whip That keeps the tiger on its high stool, He would rather have me Apprentice to his pain, hanging From the spiderlines of rope or buried under The great stakes driven deep in the ground….