Good Professor, I’m glad you weren’t my father! The little gods and demons fall in across your desk like infantry — Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan toys, spanning two millennia. Some wear hats with horns, others horned helmets. Athletic satyrs and jackal-headed women stand uniformly muscular. The old in robes, larger, watch us, smiling, satisfied they’ve outlived…
She’s mending the hem of a favorite dress her bare back pressed against a stove that’s cold for the first time in months — in flannel she felt ugly. But now it’s April the snow broken up by trumpeting jonquils — yellow and green they call her out to the porch buckled by winter’s weight….
(suggested by parts of Petrarch's Sonnet 98) In Heaven speakers touch voices on voices And God shines on the nearness of each voice (No need for asking or hesitation) with such love As guides the small light of stars at their exact and remote distances. Even so are pure and simple acts, offered in kindness,…
I killed a fly and laid my weapon next to it as one lays the weapon of a dead hero beside his body — the fly that tries to mount the window to its top; that was born out of a swamp to die in a bold effort beyond itself, and I am he that…
From the very first evening we met, I knew I’d fallen helplessly, unredemptively, in love, becoming, in the next few months, chronically sick with longing, unable to sleep without first constructing elaborate courtship fantasies in which his sculpted, unblemished face appeared at my door, smiling, perfect lips parted. . . . What’s worse, we became…
Eager to cut loose forever, we walked along the railroad tracks of 1965 wondering how we would ever react to the appearance of a goddess. If one emerged from the gas station wearing a polyester uniform, or if we found one sunbathing naked in private on the bank of the creek, her hair tied back…
She’s supposed to be land clearing Heaping the brush to be burned in first snow But the pale yellow ghost of the tall Summer grasses she sweeps down Is instead caught in her hand And placed that way in a kitchen vase Showing a warmth to last us thru winter
My envy of people my age or older whose parents both are living frequently, alas, takes the form of contempt. First, the parents are old. Old and bald and fat and slow or old and ill or at the very least mothers like what their daughters fear themselves to become, fathers blinking owlish at the…
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…
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