Poetry

The sun’s leached everything, the last dream of heading for some Greek island, the sea blue there as in March, or October. The rain gave out over a month ago. In mind are only the other summers, and my hands, calloused, fit the hands of a friend drowned eight, nine years back in the Wisconsin…

Of course the family’d call him Todd, the tie to someone’s maiden life and short, masculine. And of course he’d be blond, fragile in his Confederate uniform. Todd Carter, over the mantel, age twenty-five. Came riding up in the Battle of Franklin, one hundred feet from his own front door to six bullets. They dragged…

I. It was the first time a really sumptuous girl had taken                                                                  his hand, and Rome lay before them: the Spanish Steps’ Cinderella night-piece, dream-whitecaps falling/rising to Bernini’s drowning, monstrous boat . . . They left behind his more glamorous, her more dowdy,            …

In Durer’s Melancholia a spell nails things to the floor, nothing can travel. The woman with idle wings sits to brood, laurel leaves in her hair. Some tools are spewed at her feet—hammer, saw, nails. A marble block in the background waits for a chisel. In the clutter of the room the hourglass glares like…

From the house, it was the spread-out apron, a flat theatre of loose-strife & thistle, rimmed with pines that caught the sun on the tops after four o’clock. We never should have bought the house, it was too much, the land, the view, the May grass we sat down upon to compute interest, taxes &…

That you should have disappeared from the landing and have carried with you the dead rabbit that twitched its nose in last summer’s grey green half-dawn and our pale, cool northern night— That I followed without thinking and on foot past the abandoned station, its doric columns, all the furled      sails, the upward angling concrete…

(For W.C. Williams and Hoyt Wilhelm) to govern so the concrete in motion with the most tenuous of grips to force as much by will as act the erratic to hold within a predetermined form to summon with an easy minimalist grace the capacity repeatedly to baffle: it is the haven of the fortunately old,…

New willows slantwise in the sun blow all their chattreuse stripes in diagonal flags. Spring is a silent parade thinning the blood with surprise that it can still cause alarm and amazement. Vertical slips of tulip stand in the brown mud— the soldiery of May. By accident I drove to a town near my husband’s…

He wonders why you keep postponing the party when you have to do all the cooking. One night, it rains for three weeks. Brown water drips from the ceiling and the coq au vin tastes like plaster. His guests raise an eyebrow and he wonders why you don’t just serve the mousse, unflappable as Vogue…