Poetry

     (later acquitted of the drowning) There was the pond, trout-filled, dark green. Child-shaped for the father since the child was born. But deeper. There was the sour brown meadow, the blue jays moving against his ears. The father walked through, lonelier than anyone. There was the huge doll-son he carried, breathing heavy in his arms….

You walk into the orchard: peaches flop in the globe of shifting green Here is the sister who left you, her hair a rowdy auburn against the fluid summer You are the hustlers of peaches You ring the peaches down, down like churchbells In the faraway Idaho town, the parishioners do not hear you You…

This long, bare driveway with trees drawn tight at the end— shielding something, it always seemed, or pulling away from the fields. They unpack everywhere, stubble plowed      down for the new year. Farther out is a duck-slough. They come back faithfully, loving our guns, or some continent opening out under water. Redwings watch from dried…

I fly in sharp as Mies van der Rohe. I sit on the old couch at a raucous angle, toss out reels of the latest information but they look away, the kingfisher and his wife, my mother. Outside a jay is throwing seeds from his feeder. All around, the pines are black or pure white,…

The leafless trees are feathery,      A foxed, Victorian lace, Against a sky of milk-glass blue,      Blank, washed-out, commonplace. Between them and my window      Huge helices of snow Perform their savage, churning rites      At seventeen below. The obscurity resembles      A silken Chinese mist Wherein through caligraphic daubs      Of artistry persist Pocked and volcanic gorges,      Clenched and…

     for Joe and U. T. Summers Not of the wealthy, Coral Gables class Of traveler, nor that rarified tax bracket, These birds weathered the brutal, wind-chill facts Under our eaves, nesting in withered grass, Wormless but hopeful, and now their voice enacts Forsythian spring with primavernal racket. Their color is the elderly, moleskin gray Of…

for Allen Tate                  Through a loose camouflage      Of maples bowing gravely to everyone In the neighborhood, and the soft, remote barrage      Of waterfalls or whispers, a stippled sun            Staggers about our garden, high      On the clear morning wines of mid-July.                  Caught on a lifting tide      Above a spill of doubloons…

1. Ulcerated tooth keeps me awake, there is such pain, would have to go to the hospital to have it pulled or would bleed to death from the blood thinners, but can’t leave Mother, she falls and forgets her salve and her tranquilizers, her ankles swell so and her bowels are so bad, she almost…

“Spain will surprise you.” — Suarez Tooting down the Gran Via, tossing out bundles of loose white leaflets, the campaign caravans roll. At nine in the evening leaflets snow on the heads and shoulders of Madrilenos at sidewalk cafes and cover their plates of hot, fried churros, while those in the paseo scuff through leaflets…