From “The Back Chamber”
#Americans
A woman who lived in a tree caught the moon in a kettle. The wind on the roof of the tree thumped
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…
Some days, when you read the newspaper, it seems clear that the United States is a country devoted to poetry. You can delude yourself reading the sports pages. After finding two referen...
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…
Snow fell in the night. At five-fifteen I woke to a bluis… mounded softness where the Honda was. Cat fed and coffee… I broomed snow off the car
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
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…
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 ...
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,
“At pet stores in Detroit, you ca… frozen rats for seventy-five cents apiece, to… your pet boa constrictor” back home in Grosse Pointe,
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 ...
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…
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
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.
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