“Even when I danced erect
by the Nile’s garden
I constructed Necropolis.
Ten million fellaheen cells
of my body floated stones

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod o
when a grandfather dies.

Each morning I made my way
among gangways, elevators,
and nurses’ pods to Jane’s room
to interrogate the grave helpers
who tended her through the night

Between pond and sheepbarn, by map
Rebecca paces a double line of rus
in a sandy trench, striding on bla
creosoted eight-by-eights.
In nineteen-forty-three,

Images leap with him from branch t
brighten, his head cocks, he pause
alert.
And when I see him I want to hide
The other wood is past the hill.

It has happened suddenly,
by surprise, in an arbor,
or while drinking good coffee,
after speaking, or before,
that I dumbly inhabit

All winter your brute shoulders st
and steerhide over the ash hames,
sledges of cordwood for drying thr
for the Glenwood stove next winter
In April you pulled cartloads of

“Up, down, good, bad,” said
the man with the tubes
up his nose, " there’s lots
of variety…
However, notions

Women with hats like the rear ends
applauded you, my poems.
These are the women whose husbands
who close briefcases and ask, “Wha
I look in their eyes, I tell them

A storm was coming, that was why i
A child walked outside. I knew th
The elephant was taller than the r
The lion backed off, whining. The
Out of the window I saw zebras an