Poetry

It seems you must grow into your death slowly, as if it were a pair of new shoes waiting on the closet floor, smelling of the animal it came from, but still too big too stiff for you to wear. Meanwhile you dance barefoot your shaky dance of pretence, and we dance with you, the…

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;…