Poetry

Simon’s house was elegant, with spacious apartments. I like to think lilacs fell from my hair. Simon himself was dignified, secure. It was a supper of powerful men; I crouched under the table, at the feet of the man I loved, applying ointment to His feet, out of the usual desire. Tonight the table is…

Are these mellifluous sheep, And these the meadows made twice-melliferous by their      bleating? Is that the famous mechanical wind-up shepherd Who comes with instructions and service manual? This must be the regulation white fleece Bleached and starched, And we could be posing for our first communion pictures, Except for the nasty horns. I am beginning…

I did not know, any longer, the meaning of my happiness; it held me unexplained. Eudora Welty Out I would go, as if out were a city, and I was buoyant and self-absorbed, my own climate, though like a pond my city held its own warm and chill districts aloof to the good news and…

It bears no correlation to the living world. It is as if a malice toward all things malleable, mutable, had seized the universe and emptied its spherical alleys. How could you think it, that I would choose to stay, or break under the journey back? Like a dog I had followed your unravelling skein of…

I’ve read the propaganda, and I believe it now. I shoulda bought a van de- signed to squush a cow. Small cars are “unforgiving.” They crumple up like foam. It takes a heap o’ living To make a house a home, and if a heap o’ heap’ll satisfy some people, then who am I to…

Don’t let them tell you — the women or the men — they knew me. You knew me. Don’t let them tell you I didn’t love your mother. I loved her. Or let them tell you. Do you remember Rye? — where the small fishing boats, deprived of the receding sea, took the tide out,…

The morning flared the color of blossoming sage fixed in the season’s first heat. Thick with sediment the river flowed over its banks quieting the flats that were always rasping with tiny life. I could still see the circle of rocks, lucid and smudged, where so many times I kindled fires with my son. I…

Let me tell you What nothing means. In the boy’s room At the grade school, I stood before the urinal — I was ten, I think — And there before The absolute whiteness Of the cool fixtures, While my pale urine Smacked the porcelain And fell down In the narrow plumbing, I stared straight At…

You have to stop thinking of the 4th of July As a time to bang pots in the back yard And watch for rockets. You can’t expect The food just to be handed to you Hot off the charcoal. You have to stand and talk Through the rippling air to the host with the fork…