Poetry

Dear Bob: Thanks for your typical douche letter. Since Xmas I haven’t been doing much. I can say that I’m not watching TV all day, or smoking pot. I read Books, write letters, learn Swahili, —Smoke pot—, look for jobs, which Includes travelling and throwing my knife. I’m getting pretty good at it. I can,…

I am mentioning, long distance, my vacation. She remembers raspberries. “There were so many, it was ridiculous. In the city, they were something like eighty-nine cents a half-pint. We cleaned out the bottom of the hill and by the time we came down again new ones had gotten ripe. I must have eaten about ten…

          Swifts or barn swallows — No matter which, Well named, Swoop down like angry bees All about my head. Like little whistling darts they are, Shot by some vengeful spirit From up in the barn loft. So many questions aimed at me. What do they want of a poor old soul, Slow witted, unswift of…

Glasses drained, Cigars smoked to their bands, Conversation. Deep looks. Smiles. Night lurches, repeats itself, Sees double in our little Glassed-in terrace-garden. Winds down, as fog calms the city Spun from the blue smoke Running Circles around us. Speakers lost in foliage Direct cooling airs— Stately, bright, insouciant— Conditioned as we are To the little…

The rolls of the river unfold, trees come green, birds sing, cleverly fish keep deep unseen; water is blue, is blue to green, idle lines, worm and fly keep Dennis asleep by his pole. Flowers will lean when breezes flow, honey bee, rising seed; he thought there would never be snow. Birds shake a wing,…

(for Peter Taylor) The sad, because unspeaking, smiles overbrimming among too many people known too slightly but halfway loved, in large rooms where the light shades and flickers on the untended gardens, vines and harpstrings, of the old wallpaper . . . Whom do we speak to when we speak on these stages we make…

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,            …