Poetry

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…

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…

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…

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…

So many times I answer the phone trembling Because of the losses of the past, Concoct a disaster, Never correctly. My young aunt has a tumor, Cancer in the liver and lungs. Didn’t she serve mostaccioli and meatballs A few weeks ago? She said she was tired. At her wedding I was the flower girl….

She writes that she senses my loneliness and wonders if it’s good or if it maims and I wonder also. But can she sense how it is at the end of the day, after working well and leaving my dinner to cook, when I lie down and feel the darkness seep through the house? Does…

His knock was worth answering slowly, Teasingly, “Who’s there?”, letting my features, My fragrance break on him in the doorway Like the memory of a phantasy. He was surprised to hear his nickname On my lips; yes, he would “step in for a bit.” Daisies and good silver set my table, Dazzling him, keeping his…