Poetry

The morning flared the color of blossoming sage fixed in the season’s first heat. Thick with sediment the river flowed over its banks quieting the flats that were always rasping with tiny life. I could still see the circle of rocks, lucid and smudged, where so many times I kindled fires with my son. I…

Let me tell you What nothing means. In the boy’s room At the grade school, I stood before the urinal — I was ten, I think — And there before The absolute whiteness Of the cool fixtures, While my pale urine Smacked the porcelain And fell down In the narrow plumbing, I stared straight At…

You have to stop thinking of the 4th of July As a time to bang pots in the back yard And watch for rockets. You can’t expect The food just to be handed to you Hot off the charcoal. You have to stand and talk Through the rippling air to the host with the fork…

I don’t know. They are young, their souls are undeveloped. My own soul is no bigger than a thumbnail, my own soul at 42 is a half-moon on a thumbnail for one of those towns that fit in a crystal globe where anybody can shake down snow. There’s an opening for God in those towns….

It tries to come out of the paper and tear at me With its spider hands and its feet like rakes And its eyes like red targets and its green hair in flames And something else blue and sun-like with rays that      Rebecca says Is a vagina. Annie With the Blue Vagina. Though when my…

What whiteness will you add to this whiteness,      what candor? We walk the dirt road toward town through the clear      evening. The sky is apricot behind the black cane. Pink above, and dull raspberry on the Turkish hills across the water. The Aegean is light by the shore, then dark farther out. I cannot distinguish…

While history is unforgiven . . . Delmore Schwartz Daughter stands with her hands in her furs. She has told Dad about her nude modelling, has the check to cash. Dad himself has seen naked women standing as if their lovers’ paws had just left their hips, caressing them to their smoothness. He’s seen them…

On the table landscape of my desolate kitchen in the middle of Ireland in the bleary damp of spring— butter rises like a greasy fort from a saffron yellow saucer. A washcloth, pale yellow is folded as a miniature tent over the toys the children ranged, militia-like around their breakfast. Doorways in Fitzwilliam Square bear…

I had been thinking about love, how hard It is to remember How to fall in love, How love has the frankness Of giving in and the firmness Of logic, and yet when I tried To discover this order I noticed, far down on the beach, The swimmers testing The water, which must have been…