Poetry

“Surely in a brutal job-ridden, Puritanical, Billy Grahamized America, poetry of pleasure, describing the six or seven lovely things you did that day, is a victory of sorts.” —Robert Bly For instance planting the seed called six or seven,      lovely in itself, borderline, especially considering the six or seven layers of sleep            we had…

The boats like huge bright birds sail back when someone calls them; the small campers struggle out and climb the hill to lunch. I see the last dawdler vanish in a ridge of trees. The whole valley sighs in the haze and heat of noon. Far out a fish astounds the air, falls back into…

It’s not a month for Republicans, All business, baffled inside their suits The color of moles. The wind Shakes out the blue hair of matrons Who suck their thin cheeks pale as if At the mercy of pigfeet and banjos. I’m confused too but take heart in The first crocus wobbling out Like the precarious…

— for J.H.W. The house sits like a hat too small for the bald hill newly scraped and planted with tentative grass. In the picture you took to ponder, to decide whether to buy, the poplar that plumes the ground like a giant swaying peacock feather is almost invisible, a sprouting barely alive. Scotch pine…

You call them dragonflies But you come from another country Of snow and unions, without a summer Worth the name. I passed my childhood Picking them off the wire fence That kept my father’s junkyard From my mother’s house, and bringing them Back to the concrete slab — both morgue And front porch — where…

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…

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….

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…

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…