Poetry

He sits there, staring into the keyboard— baggy rented tux; sagging shoulders; limp hair nearly brushing the keys—                                                 hesitating to begin. His eyes glazed, as if he’d been up a week on Coca Cola and pills;                                     a Coke bottle (giant-size) half-empty…

The red rocker & the yellow field full of idle flowers face each other like two sides of an argument. The rocker is empty. Feathery tips of goldenrod touch a thousand insects promiscuously. The air is full of dragonflies the size of birds—first one, then five, now a convention— imagine a convention swooping over a…

for Father 1979 Don’t look at his hands now. Stiff and swollen, small finger curled in like a hermit: needing someone to open the ketchup, an hour to shave. That hand held the mallet, made the marble say Cicero, Juno, and laurel. Don’t think of his eyes behind thick lenses squinting at headlines, his breath…

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…

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…

Here I am on a cross-channel ferry: I have run away from Co. Kerry: I could not stand it another day: But well I know there will be hell to pay. Girls in Dublin reading “Roots”: Girls in London reading “Roots”: Girls in Paris reading “Roots”: Eyed by silent herds of screaming brutes. Outside the…

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…