Poetry

When it snowed hard, cars failed at the hairpin turn above the house. They’d slur off line and drift to a ditch — or creep back down, the driver squinting out from a half- open door, his hindsight glazed by snow on the rear window and cold breath on the mirrors. Soon he’d be at…

When you enter this country, it will seem familiar. There will be trees — elms? maples? — with the dense foliage of August afternoons in the old part of town. But in that field you can see in the distance, green stalks have just surfaced above the mud and water — is it rice? bamboo?…

The woman on the other side      of the evergreens a small boy is hidden in,      I’m wearing valleys, clear skies,      thawing banks narcissus and hollow reeds      break through. It means the world to him, this flat      archaic fabric no weather worries.      Each time I bend, brushing my hair, a bird      has just dipped through its…

Stilts sink into stiltprints left by the dead child in the soft earth. If his living friend stalks in those holes, if he throws each long crutch stiff-legged ahead of him, will he win the race? One dead foot, one live . . . he hops on bones, a lame pony, a giraffe limping fast…

At night he stands poised on a white hillside planting his poles. Below him the fringes, firs, and small alarms, the maples. He takes a short breath, lungs burning, sets off. The mountains are watching, gliding along with him. There are no sounds but those of skis scraping, his own breath as he turns, effortful,…

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…