Poetry

Walking, late at night or just around dawn, I stop for a few minutes outside a friend’s house and wonder about him and his wife upstairs sleeping, not trying the weather like me. I know they keep usual hours; in their house down the hill from me, I see their lights go out most midnights…

She waited while he drank his loss away, now makes him drink his medicine, won’t let him stay alone. It could be me, she says, his saint, his caryatid. She grows gardenias in a window box two floors above the garbage. She is the Minnesota farm, the miles she walked to school, black bread she…

He sits there, staring into the keyboard— baggy rented tux; sagging shoulders; limp hair nearly brushing the keys—                                                 hesitating to begin. His eyes glazed, as if he’d been up a week on Coca Cola and pills;                                     a Coke bottle (giant-size) half-empty…

The red rocker & the yellow field full of idle flowers face each other like two sides of an argument. The rocker is empty. Feathery tips of goldenrod touch a thousand insects promiscuously. The air is full of dragonflies the size of birds—first one, then five, now a convention— imagine a convention swooping over a…

for Father 1979 Don’t look at his hands now. Stiff and swollen, small finger curled in like a hermit: needing someone to open the ketchup, an hour to shave. That hand held the mallet, made the marble say Cicero, Juno, and laurel. Don’t think of his eyes behind thick lenses squinting at headlines, his breath…

I have banked the fires of my body into a small but steady blaze, here in the kitchen where the dough has a life of its own, breathing under its damp cloth like a sleeping child; where the real child plays under the table, pretending the tablecloth is a tent, practicing departures; where a dim…

The eye of the stove is as red as the sun sunk to the frigid ground. An efficient sky wastes no time turning pink; the Dog Star scratches through the cobalt of near-dark. I stare at the slim silhouettes of trees pawed by the wind, & the house rocks, dizzy as the deck of a…

Between the hand in the child’s trouser pocket And his face tilted toward the sky, blank as the sky, The man could see a question forming. Small White clouds hung above the irregular Chimneys the length of the avenue. The sidewalk Was empty, except for a woman at the bus-stop Rhythmically slapping a newspaper against…

I sit in my stockyard of a room: a whole trainload of footwear, a desk of paper innuendos, correspondence with the invalids. . . . Dear Sympathy, One leg, an entire memory bank forgotten, where have you flown? Better to float on a raft out to sea: there’s the great ocean to swallow me up,…