Poetry

The face looking into the room; Behind it light, shaking, like heat Lightning; the face calm and knowing; Seeing but not seeing who I am; The mouth maybe telling something. Something about our helplessness; Something about the confusions of beasts; The consequence of error; systems Haywire, or working; the stars gone All wrong in the…

She’s like the moon: at perigee his tides are out of whack, his coasts tormented. What was one place is called another, farther in or out than on the charts or in old stories. He rents a plane and flies up in the evening to observe as one might an eclipse, or storm, or nine…

Your words, my father, are clouds, spirits to inhabit, things to trace in the changes of light. Where fish dart in the shallows and the sun follows on the rise of the island, in the circle of birds, your “historia scholastica” will vanish, like these clouds, each a life with its own shadow on the…

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…