Poetry

I He smoked those stubby black cigars      my father smoked and like my father would not smile      for photographs. But mounting a horse the color of straw      or rising at dawn to tour the blossom littered fields      he paid the camera little mind, and kept his coattails      turning to history. That spring the sound of…

for Dee Dog, Dreaming There is always something; and past that something Something else: Jarrell’s words lingering as late in our house the wild skid of a car overrides the night’s news, snow icing blind the world. I nod from room to room, remembering all these somethings come to nothing. I come to you in…

I’ve got a feeling that moves me deep inside oh yeah I’ve got a feeling I think I’ll put it into verse oh yeah in fact this feeling of mine is almost an idea, or a pair of ideas with a feeling attached, or rather the two ideas swim in the feeling like eccentric bathers…

Composed of air, and thus always composed in silence, sharing the sun’s color, jointweed, poverty grass, british soldiers, do not bend as the wind passes nor breathe with more garrulous greenery. Inland from the salt wash, they wear the shifty winter out with waiting, and summer too, tight-lipped as stone, neither reckless in growth nor…

Everything stops. A fat man on his way to Baltimore smokes for three hours in the club car. The porter slips out and calls his wife, he has one dime left and he’s almost yelling. Somewhere south of York, she thinks he said. The funeral procession leaves its lights on and out of this pure…

Consider the annals of a small town in western North Carolina. Assemble the interesting sequences of fact and supposition from several points of view. Sift. Beyond a certain point, you say, these facts are not interesting; or, you say you’ll never be able to uncover details vivid enough to be interesting. You are wrong on…

First it was only the winter trees— their boughs eloquent at midnight with small but mortal explosions, and always a humming under the lashings of storm. Nights I sat at the kitchen door listening out into the darkness until finally spring came, and everything transcended. As one by one the ponds opened, took the white…

It is before an undeclared war. She is full of feeling, yet abstracted; she must tend to details: see that the church is ready, the rings present, her sister’s dress, a pale green, is the right shade of dress that will not war with her mother’s. A floating homunculus is present in her body, but…

Is there any reason why a poem shouldn’t at least occasionally come through for us in a concrete way and get something done? Because I need to get something across to a particular individual with whom I have no normal contact, I mean I never see this guy, and yet I’ve got something to say…