Poetry

it didn’t take long for papa to find his place. he sat down on the coffee table and pulled out his matches. the first one lit easily so he put it on the floor between his feet and the flame sandwich ate him up. mama came in screaming and running about like my rabbits in…

The earth swept clean of creatures not its own: earth, ocean, air, to you do we belong only? No! The long climb up from slime turning on a dime      remains, hanging on by a thread to the dead generations, lowly, encapsulated though once I read in TIME, that wisdom of the week we twitchy moderns…

And now here is a message to all those people for whom there is no hope:

“. . . it is not War which is tearing up the world, it is Conscience . . .”      —in The Fixer “The honors of this world, what are they but puff, and emptiness, and peril of falling?”      —St. Augustine `How does it feel when you fall?‘ Asked plainly enough at the dinner table Mother…

In 2 days over the ocean.

I hear typing so I go over to see what my wife is writing. There is something like a museum about her tonight, a feeling of great space and flames that burn unseen, inside houses in the nineteenth century. I suppose she can hear hooves go past, outside. I suppose that she can sit by…

The game of baseball is not a metaphor and I know it’s not really life. The chalky green diamond, the lovely dusty brown lanes I see from airplanes multiplying around the cities are only neat playing fields. Their structure is not the frame of history carved out of forest, that is not what I see…

Road, hog, assassin, mirror. Some of its favorite words, which are breath. Or handwriting: the long tail of the ‘y’ disappear- ing into a barn like a rodent’s, and suddenly it is winter after all. After all what? After the ponds dry up in mid August and the children drop pins down each canyon and…

Black summers have baked the yellow stone. Now, wall and earth inseparable: a thickly floored hole. Fat dress-and-scarf-drenched woman. Under a grey stone a lizard squints. Past here are watches But now, in the simmer of a weekly afternoon, A small drum, answering the shofarm here, where Women dumped their babies on the pointed rock….