Poetry

A Dream

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…

Send a Message to Mary but Don’t Bother if You Have an Important Television Programme to Watch

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…

Holding A Raccon’s Jaw

Snow melting when I left you, and I took This fragile jaw we’d found in melting snow Two springs before I left, beside a brook Where raccoons washed their hands. And this, I know, Is that raccoon we’d watched for every day. Though at the time her wild human hand Had gestured inexplicably, I say…

Mostly Departures

for L. I can almost see the prairie where you are— the flowering grasses and the cones of white blossoms on the horse chestnut trees. The horizon calms you after months of cities. I imagine your eyes seek that line as if you had cast it out over water. A few nights ago, I saw…

You Hated Spain

     Spain frightened you. Spain where I felt at home. The blood-raw light, The oiled anchovy faces, the African Black edges to everything, frightened you. Your schooling had somehow omitted Spain. The wrought-iron grille, death and the Arab drum. You did not know the language, your soul was empty Of the signs, and the welding light…

Sally

Sally, I was happy with you. Yet a dirty cafeteria in a railway station — In the hour before dawn over a formica table Confetti’ed with cigarette ash and coffee stains — Was all we ever knew of a home together. “Give me a child and let me go”: “Give me a child and let…

Blue Nude

It is not true what they say about the body: that it must be loved, that it cannot sleep through its nights alone without injury. Look at me. Look at the way the artist lies about his loneliness, painting a room where walls, floor, and ceiling converge on a door too small for me to…