Poetry

Letter To The Country

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…

Circus Master

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….

In The Mist

On cool, damp evenings at the end of July, you can walk into a mist; and the mist seems to disappear — from the dirt road; from the hill; from the trees. . . But in the full moon, you can begin to see it again — it gets closer, leaving a ring of clearness…

The Pre-Rusted Skyscrapers

shaped like megaliths, also like tombstones, their sharp shoulders making the air emptier, clearer, and turning the day like a Monet sequence: gray- blue, shimmering, surfaceless, when between you and the morning light; almost haystacks on a mid- summer mid-afternoon, then rusting in earnest, grieving watchfires, into the dark. . . And the planes always…

Accomplice

1 Getting out after reading, or writing, late — or was it waiting for a call? — past the windows where, on hot nights, they don’t pull all the shades all the way down. . . (I walk by slowly, twice.) Then up a darker, more private street. My footsteps echo. Echo? Someone else’s feet,…

In The Dark Our Story

           is still unwinding. It’s 1919, the train’s dropped us in the Panhandle. This landscape is only for the Farmer’s pleasure. We’re stick figures, black things moving in a sunlit picture; how we love is our only secret. The Farmer watches me hour on hour from his velvet chair beside the field. You say it’s…

1930

Because the shadows are sepia all the little precisions seem soft, a quaking of leaves that extend their tenuous web We imagine it gold because it is August there is Marjorie       there is Ian eyes averted, modestly, so great is their pleasure in each other And you see his bare arm, exactly as graceful…

Appleseed

For John Chapman (1775-1845) It is not the man of action that we in the fragmented world envy, for often we know too well why we ourselves do not act. It is the man of mission, the one who embodies his purposes naturally in all his acts, whose days interweave, he is the one we…

The Henyard Round

1. From the dark yard by the sheep barn the cock crowed to the sun’s pale spectral foreblossoming eastward in June, crowed,      and crowed later each day through fall and winter, this grand conquistador of January drifts, this almost-useless vain strutter with wild monomaniac eye, burnished swollen chest, yellow feet serpent-scaled, and bloodred comb, who…