“Dear wife, I don’t suppose you understand my cheerfulness these days with passion cooling, my love-songs of a bachelor, my boyish fooling, the way I lie so easy on my own side or rise to screw newspaper for the fire? Crooning over breakfast pans is all that I desire. Safely alive in the quiet light…
My eldest sister arrived home that morning In her white muslin evening dress. `Who the hell do you think you are Running out to dances in next to nothing? As though we hadn’t enough bother With the world at war, if not at an end.’ My father was pounding the breakfast-table. `Those Yankees were touch…
Looking back, the language scribbles. What’s hidden, having been said? Almost everything? Thrilling to think There was a secret there somewhere, A bird singing in the heart’s forest. Two people sitting by a river; Sunlight, shadow, some pretty trees; Death dappling in the flowing water; Beautiful to think about, Romance inscrutable as music. Out of…
Ten years into memory, a house in the bright fluid time—dark grain of walnut, dark women’s bodies, flower-shadows in paintings by sisters. 1632 Walnut Street: the solid multiples of eight like a vintage Oldsmobile, the curves of the numbers, the porch, its roof, the porch light shaped a little by…
for Tom What a coincidence. The color of our hair. Ancestral blood. You arriving as I do, our arrival in light. Shine up the pyres now, we can see clear through to the past: one big erasure on the map of Europe. What a common hospitality: a tongue. For example, this dumb lullaby we speak,…
All through that Sunday afternoon a kite flew above the Sunday, a tightened drumhead, an armful of blown chaff. I’d seen it gray and slippy in the making, I’d tapped it when it dried out white and stiff, I’d tied the bows of newspaper along its six-foot tail. But now it was far up like…
In the night of the changing year I misplaced winter. Tumbling down with the old sins, the promises, I woke up sniffing. No cares. Walkway splashes sing to my ears of an evening in May. The scent of thirty springs is rising. A full-hipped beauty in green, ripe for the flood, bustles over her scrawny…
You think you earned this space on earth, but look at the gold face of the teen-age pharaoh, smug as a shriner in his box with no diploma, a plot flashy enough for Manhattan. Early death, then what a task dragging a sofa into the grave, a couple of floor lamps, the alarm set for…
I. I stood between them, the one with his tawny intelligence and fencer’s containment, his speech like a bowstring and another, unshorn and bewildered in the tubs of his wellingtons, smiling at me for help, faced with this stranger I’d brought him. II. Then the cunning voice of poetry came out of the wood across…
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