Poetry

Overture. A shutter opens. Down Goes light. The Norfolk Island pine Potted in peatmoss breathes Deeply once; resigns itself on cue. Under the dimming dervish crown Extend now four, no, five fringed limbs (Twelve more hang groundward barely skirting trance) In stills — in stills that — yes! inspired Revolve and quicken. As though fingers…

It was as if he took all his springs and summers, falls and winters, and lived each in one dose. They no longer brought, like salesmen, again and again, their samples of fruit and leaves. They stretched through years. They claimed their territory. He was born into fifteen years of alert cold. Knowing nothing but…

Lordliest maple, of the thick-poured trunk, late, later, latest, still to be treasuring so uncountably many leaves — themselves forgetting themselves in a last firebrand fling earthward, down the leaning helix of a standing breeze; to lie among the eagerer fledglings, earlier dead, daffodil to crimson webfeet imprinted on the icehard mud. Each single leaf…

1. Salmo gardneri, mercurially quick in a thin silverfoil fish-oilskin slicker, rash of rainbow raked along the sides, on a whiplash tack perpetually, tunneling through a headstream waterwall; then sinking down to dredge among the drowsing instars, silt, threaded algae, green-gelled light; planing up past clumps and globes of bubbles, a hovel stuccoed in pearls,…

At first you will know her as yours only by a vague      contrariness That characterizes everyone else you love, among others      you and myself. You will see in her your marriage — that is there will be      more Of her mother than you thought you bargained for. You will find her set of mind, her…

Feeding the Birds Lured by unnatural feeding, by promises of plenty lavishly sprinkled and arced and scattered on cold weather, even the tufted titmouse has recently been known to loiter in the north here into winter. To feed or not to feed? The weather lady is careful, subtle, non-committal, anxious: “I’m sure more studies must…

I turn from the mirror to the garden where the December rose grows up orange above the wall. Soughing the grasses chinked in and threaded on its top — the wind displaces the still life of a great turf, like Durer’s. The great gray rain comes slanting down interrupting the museum in my eyes. Ars…

     the soul, Remembering how she felt, but what she felt Remembering not (Wordsworth) When your post-War Plymouth rattled up to our eternal practice, and you vaulted the fence, we’d drift down from the wildness memory does not hold, still half sky from shagging day-long flies. Sweat-suited, someone’s father, you’d bawl “Men!” Did the future press…