Poetry

I sit in my stockyard of a room: a whole trainload of footwear, a desk of paper innuendos, correspondence with the invalids. . . . Dear Sympathy, One leg, an entire memory bank forgotten, where have you flown? Better to float on a raft out to sea: there’s the great ocean to swallow me up,…

More and more I think about you, and the others — your likes and unlikes — who chose to harden their      difference until it was so dense, it would shine of itself in the dark; lived narrow into towers, to the faces of wives and children loved more steadily than most; turned their even-planed      desks…

Love, the flower bed we tended Has grown into a congregation Of tufted old men and arthritic women, The men’s beards scattered by evening winds, The red and yellow dresses of the women Disintegrating Into the earth. And though we were gentle and steady, We called attention to ourselves In every corner of the world….

This fog over the body and mind, this sleeping too long on the grill of the mattress while morning pours in. . . . It’s ten below. The sun is shining but it’s too cold to go out. The children, true, are bundled up, drive their snowmobiles over the ice with a swishing sound, a…

(Ormos Athinios, Thira) Morning comes, and the baked look of rising early on people’s faces; or evening, and the cool with a trace of rot in it lifts off the face of the waves. And in the concrete cafe, the simple blank shoulders of fascination, changed in no year; with emptiness in their mouths —…

My handwriting’s big, like grazing cattle, I’m learning cursive on the dock The summer that polio twists my mother’s legs. I write as she reads me the fable Of the prince who was sleepless for 100 years. There’s always a broken heart And I know sleepless nights are already a spell. White gauze, the curtains…

I. Not to speak when we’re so close is to be small and shapeless, unlike the other, small and not part of the clouds, the islands of sky, the inhaled breath. To forget women while gazing at their form. As when the navies are formless, ships without number, planted in the ocean as on plateaus…

He woke in a different country, his own hands Rose to his mouth, and his fingers Rubbed at his eyes, and he was standing On his own feet, but the people passing Had darkened their speech like daylight going dim Around him, he told them to speak slowly, he told them To listen, please, he…

—Prayer, George Herbert The sun’s going down. Which is nothing new.      And there’s nothing special about the end of this day,      Even if a lot of the things we thought we knew Start disappearing with the light. What can you say? It’s a strange feeling, kind of a relief,      To sit in the dark and…