Poetry

The skin we didn’t ask for, skin of weather which keeps up shivering in Gorky. . The question is whether to greet it like the Afghan peasant walking barefoot through snow or open an umbrella, take a crash course in camouflage, learn to ski. The skin of place which wears the landscape, glows with an…

We went down to the ocean, wearing the silk hats we wore to the funeral. It was like a party, people drank too much. No one mentioned the dead child. Someone said that the idea for escalators came from the waves. A woman interpreted dreams: a window stood for fear, a wheatfield, fate. I lay…

I thank these Kinsmen of the Shelf — Misreading Dickinson I thought I had discovered there A phrase that said it all: “These Kinsmen of the Self.” We know them, lose them, Discover them again, discover Yet more kinsmen, and the self Survives, growing more fragile And more brutal at the selfsame Time. She knew,…

Thrown swallows, called to the delirious Probate of March, declare the unfinishable Resumed and teeming among the stopped towers, Near the plaque for a boy gunned down At the street’s turning, and they shrill their choice Of the entangling covenant, although Each plummet from the topslide of their arcs Obeys a command also. The call…

Let us those who have obliterated so many faces deny their own faces let us grant them no faces let us blot out their faces the sun eats the snow                        let time devour their faces let us look for the faces of those they killed who died faceless in the name of…

     How the coffin was not even carried by pall bearers but lamely rolled on wheels from the hears. Not even the weight of the body. Not that last presence felt by any other body. Alex in aluminum. Left out of the earth under the hired canvas pavilion on that plastic grass. One of the hinges…

Strolling through Carcasonne is, after all, Of interest, to the noonday touring spirit That moves us toward the booth, clapping as help In ages past the Michelin testament. One notes the battlements, presentable As any movie-set; the tidy chapel, Its table for petition-signing busy Amid the Gothic shades; houses and shops Leaning together over courts…

I sit by the window of a cafe and watch the thin city rain bounce off the tops of cars and paste the hair of passers-by to their cheeks. Near me, two women talk across the one-legged disk of the table, the grain of shared thinking in their faces. A year ago, we talked like…

(“You can even make something not a poem become a poem . . . by a certain squint or a certain way of leaning our ears we find them.” W.S.) If I could only squint like Bill Stafford then I would be in that country where men and women speak poetry, unsurprised, as trees speak…