I, too, have trailed my father’s spirit From the mud-walled cabin behind the mountain Where he was born and bred, TB and scarletina, The farm where he was first hired out, To Wigan, to Crewe junction, A building-site from which he disappeared And took passage, almost, for Argentina. The mountain is coming down with hazel,…
They’re kindly here, to let us linger so late, Long after the shutters are up. A waiter glides from the kitchen with a plate Of stew, or some thick soup, And settles himself at the next table but one. We know, you and I, that it’s over, That something or other has come between Us,…
You stand waiting. You listen. At your back the house is still, between the tickings of clocks and timbers. Beneath the rough soles of your feet you can feel the cellar stretching to its foundations — silence in the stone, the furnace brooding. …
You chose me for widow not for wife transferring your pain on schedule I turned darker you turned paler on schedule. You chose me for elegy. This spring the confused migrations collide with the smokeless chimney. I air myself out with the mildewed wardrobe you left hung like an armory. Oh you’ve done it, you’ve…
Through the soft pulp of farmed pine, the saw moves with the incessant logic of progress. Why stand up when you can fall down? Why be a tree when you can be a house? Here there is nothing to hope for but branches. As the saw works, it whispers of soft flanks weathering in lumberyards….
I would like to take it all back, this suit doesn’t belong to me. I’m the undercover man, an agent transferred to a far district. What I fear is a murmur from across the fields, the giant leech that just slid over the porch railing. If I listen to the singer — it’s a state…
This one does its work by returning over and over to the place where it began until even memory bears no splinters. Flatness, flatness, the plane dreams as it sweeps down every plank envisioning unsown fields, boxcars, Unitarian churches. “Lie down,” sings the plane. “Lie down and be the same as all the rest.”
for my aunt The water is dark and cold and I can hold it. I drink from my hands. You are out of my reach, your eyes closed holding only a thin blue light. Moss darkens my window, covering the sky like hair. Here, we can’t see the moon. It views you from the head…
At the table she used to sew at, he uses his brass desk scissors to cut up his shirt. Not that the shirt was that far gone: one ragged cuff, one elbow through; but here he is, cutting away the collar she long since turned. What gets to him finally, using his…
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