Poetry

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…

                           Siste, viator Bereaved of mind by a weird truck, Our fraternal philosopher To whom a Spring snow was mortal Winter— a wild driver in the best Of cases, on the margins of Communicability— exchanged a bad Appointment in New Hampshire For a grave in the Jewish Cemetery In Waltham, Massachusetts. Across The street…

New willows slantwise in the sun blow all their chattreuse stripes in diagonal flags. Spring is a silent parade thinning the blood with surprise that it can still cause alarm and amazement. Vertical slips of tulip stand in the brown mud— the soldiery of May. By accident I drove to a town near my husband’s…

He wonders why you keep postponing the party when you have to do all the cooking. One night, it rains for three weeks. Brown water drips from the ceiling and the coq au vin tastes like plaster. His guests raise an eyebrow and he wonders why you don’t just serve the mousse, unflappable as Vogue…

for Louis, my father As God knows,           the child sees,                 in middle age The strewn windfall of the befallen.                            Today I am reading the poems written when I was a child (the cobalt tower text Of Hart Crane; spinster Stevens’ intricate Book of needles; oracular Yeats, Unkind). And I am writing a…

His arms are thin in the lamplight on the long table. Floods of yellow and amber light holding the June roses in suspension with him, his tan touched with a few scabs of baseball. A bead of blood has loosened itself from his wrist and glints like a ladybug as he turns it in the…

The power was off. We cleared dishes from the table. Shutters crashed against the windows. Below us, in the lake, the minnows were in a frenzy. Limbs cracked like knuckles—one great trunk smashed to the ground. Leaves flew past, pasted themselves to the panes. Somewhere, my father was on a train. The blue walls quaked,…

One night there was no moon, and never had been. In the space where the moon was            the weather Stopped, everything happened for The first time.      I cannot imagine space As it then was, the cradle unrocking In the tideless air. The man stopped, the shadow vanished, There was nothing to read. In their…

The absurd has its reasons which the reason      absorbs: now the outlines throb when you draw, and the decade of sight left you      will leave you diligently vulnerable to the long littleness of life,      who revealed so little else— for you humanity was definable      broadly by its weaknesses or narrowly as your crayon could encroach…