Poetry

Killing anything was pure accident. A dumb stalker, a worse shot—I went almost daily, to the woods. A favorite prey was slow and shallow: a brook. I’d say, as it moved languidly: Don’t move, you rascal! And when it did, of course, as it does, I’d shoot. I liked that: no wound, or at least…

First, let us move away,      but leave behind us The grand piano, the Steuben glass, books and Phonograph records, what might distract us, And since this is a real journey—surrounded By stars and their shadows and what is beyond Them—we will not travel. We sit all day and night and watch the moths Eat our…

A year before I found what was new: a stream sizzled over stones, August heat rattled the ocean’s brittle edge like a loose pane, a field where weeds like needles poked the wool of thick air. Usually eyes say no to thorns and stick to roses. Today even you saw that ponds brim with sky…

An especially forlorn specimen Answers a marriage ad On a street of compulsory misfortune One drizzly November afternoon Sorrow with its sidekicks and damsels In a diningroom with a pianola which the subway      rattles from time to time A cup of tea with her eyelash floating in it Cakes the size and color of a…

Little lady of the Welcome Wagon in the suburb I now call home, I waited eight months to hear your voice chirping across my telephone, and when you came, and when you came, I heard your wings flap you away before I could reach my door to see what love sent you here, and why….

1 april: that point from which the temperate world ripens and suspends and leaves itself behind. a man hangs by one hand from the slender branch of his life. even his children he has cautioned away from that tree: the early apple, not long before blossom, the one the bluejays always get the fruit of….

With its boarded-up windows At the end of a dead-end street, In the dead of winter, A huge, grim institution I return to, I have unfinished Business to complete With its night-nurses, And other shadowy hirelings. *     *      * At daybreak, darkly, When the doors of its emergency entrance Flap across The line of vision, From…

Spring is still the groundswell of your body heaving up from its wildly patient sleep. I can’t explain that, but know why we imagine for the dead a life without desire—so they will not want ours. Palimpset of smoke, you’re blown past recognition into mere expectancy, the place a rock was, a pure attitude of…

They were naked and the earth Was covered with light snow. They squatted and said nothing. The children appeared asleep. It got dark and they were still there: On a vast plain without landmarks, Under a sky the color of slate and lead, On an evening in late December. I’m told, but do not believe,…