Poetry

Did you see the modest girl who was ravished by young Neil on a sunny day on top of a hill: and no one at all near at hand but a young child who could not walk. Pity O King I wasn’t his, I wouldn’t have uttered a cry or shout though he would have…

I wish I could walk deep into a field of spiked wheat reaching my waist and not ask that question, where the sun laces my chest with its indifferent heat, and the sky seems only a backdrop for sharp birds that tuck their wings and glide, where each step pops crickets into quick arcs like…

There is no Simple circumstance, As when a boy hiding In a closet Beside a manikin swoons In the mist of A grandmother’s sachet. The crooked White sticks of the legs And arms bent around Him, as he imagines He is older, Standing in a wooded field, The beads of lavender Rolling In the yellow…

Sometimes I see the schoolmaster on the boat that is shiny with brine and comes from Asia. He is the Ancient Mariner and his finger jabs at a pamphlet soaked with salt, the words running away from back to front, the albatross outstretched, its eyes glazing. The rickshaws arrive at the wedding, with the dead…

Wanting leads to worse than oddity. The bones creak like bamboo in wind, and strain toward a better life outside the body, the life everything has that isn’t human. Feel the chair under you? What does it want? Does lust bend it silly like a rubber crutch? Tell a tree about the silky clasp of…

She re-enters her life the way a parachutist re-enters the coarser atmosphere of earth, exchanging the sensual shapes of clouds for cloud-shaped trees rushing to meet her, their branches sharp, their soft leaves transitory. She notices smells, the scent of pines piercing the surface of memory— that dark lake submerged in pines in which her…

There — but for the clutch of luck — go I. At daybreak — in the pitch, arctic fog of a February      daybreak — Shoulderlength helmets in the watchtowers of the      concentration camp Caught me out in the intersecting arcs of the swirling      searchlights: There were at least a zillion of us caught out there…

In dreams silent secret and unafraid I steal away to find you I’ve divined Your wish to see me I steal away to find You in a forest digging with a spade I touch your shoulder feeling my heart race To think how glad you’ll be but slowly quite Slowly you turn blindly to me…

Emptying the teapot of tealeaves I moped at the kitchen      sink: Thinking of thinkers who think that they are the only      thinkers who think. The teapot was red enamel and the daylight outside was      dark And the appletree at the end of my cabbagepatch was      peering back up at my cottage Quite unable to budge…