Poetry

  • At Home, Far Away Inside

    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…

  • Green, A Chance

    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…

  • To the Welcome Wagon Lady

    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….

  • the world of apples

    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….

  • The Great Anonymous Eye and Ear

    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…

  • Less of the Same

    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…

  • Photographer’s Hood

    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,…

  • Nameless

    A good day between constantly nervous, no major breakdown on the way to work, no self-concept of a man missing his life. A good day. Somewhere maybe someone paints his walls with a shotgun blast and blows out his unhappiness: so what? Be sure he does it also at this moment. Over and over. His…