From “The Back Chamber”
#Americans
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…
The clock of my days winds down. The cat eats sparrows outside my w… Once, she brought me a small rabbi… which we devoured together, under the Empire Table
It has happened suddenly, by surprise, in an arbor, or while drinking good coffee, after speaking, or before, that I dumbly inhabit
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,
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…
Mount Kearsarge shines with ice;… snow slides onto snow; no stream,… budges but remains still. Tonight we carry armloads of logs from woodshed to Glenwood and buil…
Fifteen years ago his heart infarcted and he stopped smoking. At eighty he trembled like a birch but remained vigorous and acute.
Images leap with him from branch to branch. His eyes brighten, his head cocks, he pauses under a green bough, And when I see him I want to hide him somewhere. The other wood ...
Katie could put her feet behind he… Or do a grand plié, position two, Her suppleness magnificent in bed. I strained my lower back, and Kat… Only a little, doing what we could…
Twelve people, most of us stranger… in Ann Arbor, drinking Cribari fr… Then two young men, who cooked him… carry him to the table on a large square of plywood: his…
In a week or ten days the snow and ice will melt from Cemetery Road. I’m coming! Don’t move! Once again it is April.
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...
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.
“Up, down, good, bad,” said the man with the tubes up his nose, " there’s lots of variety… However, notions
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…