#Americans
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
My son, my executioner, I take you in my arms, Quiet and small and just astir And whom my body warms. Sweet death, small son, our instru…
Fifteen years ago his heart infarcted and he stopped smoking. At eighty he trembled like a birch but remained vigorous and acute.
High on a slope in New Guinea The Grumman Hellcat lodges among bright vines as thick as arms. In 1943, the clenched hand of a pilot
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.
“Even when I danced erect by the Nile’s garden I constructed Necropolis. Ten million fellaheen cells of my body floated stones
When you like a woman, you talk and talk. One night you kiss. Another night you fuck. You’re both content,
A storm was coming, that was why it was dark. The wind was blowing the fronds of the palm trees off. They were maples. I looked out the window across the big lawn. The house was huge, f...
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,
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…
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…
Ruminant pillows! Gregarious soft… If one of you found a gap in a sto… the rest of you—rams, ewes, bucks,… mothers and daughters, old grandfa… cousins and aunts, small bleating…
1. I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems. An ambitious project—but sensible, I think. And it seems to me that contemporary American ...
Pale gold of the walls, gold of the centers of daisies, yellow… pressing from a clear bowl. All da… we lay on the bed, my hand stroking the deep
When the young husband picked up h… in the taxi one block from her tow… first lunch together, in a hotel d… with a room key in his pocket, midtown traffic gridlocked and was…