Poetry

It is not music, though one has tried music. It is not nature, though one has tried The rose, the bluebird, and the bear. It is not death, though one has often died. None of these things is there. In the everywhere that is nowhere Neither the inside nor the outside Neither east nor west…

I am driftwood on his beach, without an Uncle or a radio. I used to be a Spanish ship. Thinking of Seville, mahogany, he picks me up feeling both superior and sorry. *     *      * Or I am brave and he is smaller than the smallest thing he can remember. They had him sit for hours…

No resolution, understanding when she comes abrupt, final anger, rage at the painful displacement, the brutal use of rational love, the meagerness of the intentional offering.

Deep shade and the shades Of the great surround me. In the distance, the house Is a ghost over grass. You can see clear through it. This tree is standing still, Great names gnarling the bark Like the names of lovers. What were they but lovers Of this shadowing tree? Last evening at Kilkee The…

The constant X equals all variables: even strangers soon to be wonders just amount to X. Cistercians, all `sister’, in any case sexless, insist the last & best is left for X. So Wilde’s little swallow made children cry, don’t fly! But action is prayer for the poor and/or ill; just makes equal stone and…

It becomes cold and colder the year has no color in it little Dimitri plays the piano until his fingers stiffen with cold. Cold in the line waiting for bread six hours make us patient thin animals waiting as though bread is an unfamiliar food a kind of miracle we hardly expect. We give it…

The horse beneath me seemed To know what course to steer Through the horror of snow I dreamed, And so I had no fear, Nor was I chilled to death By the wind’s white shudders, thanks To the veils of his patient breath And the mist of sweat from his flanks. It seemed that all…

When the shift was over he went out and stood under the night sky a mile from the darkened baseball stadium and waited for the bus. He could taste nickel under his tongue, and when he swiped the back of his hand across his nose he caught the smell of hydrochloric acid. There were clouds…

We decided to have the abortion, became killers together. The period that came changed nothing. They were dead, that young couple who had been for life. As we talked of it in bed, the crash was not a surprise. We went to the window, looked at the crushed cars and the gleaming curved shears of…