From “The Back Chamber”
#Americans
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…
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…
At the edge of the city the picker… vomits and dies. The river with its white hair staggers to th… My life lay crumpled like a smashe… Windows barred, ivy, square stone.
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…
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
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…
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.
If he and she do not know each oth… they will not meet again; if he av… if she has grown insensible skin u… only the tribute of another’s cry;… as revenge on old lovers or famili…
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 the mid August, in the second… of my First Polar Expedition, the… almost upon us, Kantiuk and I attempted to dash the sledge along Crispin Bay, searching agai…
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
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
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…
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…