Poetry

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,            …

In Durer’s Melancholia a spell nails things to the floor, nothing can travel. The woman with idle wings sits to brood, laurel leaves in her hair. Some tools are spewed at her feet—hammer, saw, nails. A marble block in the background waits for a chisel. In the clutter of the room the hourglass glares like…

From the house, it was the spread-out apron, a flat theatre of loose-strife & thistle, rimmed with pines that caught the sun on the tops after four o’clock. We never should have bought the house, it was too much, the land, the view, the May grass we sat down upon to compute interest, taxes &…

That you should have disappeared from the landing and have carried with you the dead rabbit that twitched its nose in last summer’s grey green half-dawn and our pale, cool northern night— That I followed without thinking and on foot past the abandoned station, its doric columns, all the furled      sails, the upward angling concrete…

(For W.C. Williams and Hoyt Wilhelm) to govern so the concrete in motion with the most tenuous of grips to force as much by will as act the erratic to hold within a predetermined form to summon with an easy minimalist grace the capacity repeatedly to baffle: it is the haven of the fortunately old,…