From “The Back Chamber”
#AmericanWriters
December twenty-first we gather at the white Church fest… red and green, the tree flashing green-red lights beside the altar. After the children of Sunday Scho…
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…
August, goldenrod blowing. We wal… into the graveyard, to find my grandfather’s grave. Ten years… I came here last, bringing marigolds from the round garden
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 ...
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 I walk in my house I see pic… bought long ago, framed and hangin… —de Kooning, Arp, Laurencin, Hen… that I’ve cherished and stared at… yet my eyes keep returning to the…
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
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…
when my father had been dead a wee… I woke with his voice in my ear I sat up in bed and held my breath
A woman who lived in a tree caught the moon in a kettle. The wind on the roof of the tree thumped
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.
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...
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 ...
“Even when I danced erect by the Nile’s garden I constructed Necropolis. Ten million fellaheen cells of my body floated stones