Poetry

  • Snapshot

    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…

  • Communication Theory

    The highway was dark, strung with cats’-eyes, red and      yellow, passing My window where my face floated; I watched Your face above the steering wheel, as always, calm to the      bone; Your brown eyes and full lips droop, but the sadness is      genetic only; The space beside your eyes is like a smooth pool. We…

  • Reading Dante

    The Seraphim, whose eyes are jewels, read the Inferno of Dante Alighieri anagogically, without weeping. Justice is a simple thing for them, fluttering in their empty robes. But I once wandered through the Wood of Suicides with a girl who thought Pietro delle Vigne had a perfect right to his own flesh even when he…

  • A Certain Squint

    (“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…

  • Expressway Driving

    White birches scream winter, their treetops fright wigs attenuated in the arc light. Small planes and radio-beacon spires dot the black sky like stars amid the cirrus patches scurrying north for denser cover. Out in the russia-flats between cities wheatlike anonymous marshgrass denies the complications of leavetaking or arrival. Towns pale the dark with self-importance….

  • Recompense

    My name is Pablo Picasso And my name rhymes In French, in Catalan, even in American As I travel, stopping often To call aloud the single word Lady I find my ghost is still feared. I’d like to answer: This was my body, I give it to you, And this my art, which is only…