I love to go to sleep, When bed takes me like a lover wrapping my limbs in cool linen, soothing the fretfulness

The whole world is flat & I am round. Even women avert their eyes, & men, embarrassed by the messy way

Sometimes the poem doesn’t want to come; it hides from the poet like a playful cat who has run

Rising in the morning like warm bread, from a bed in America, the aroma

You sleep in the darkness, you with the back I love & the gift of sleeping through my noisy nights of poetry. I have taken other men into my tho…

The lessons we learned here (fumbling with our lunchbags, handkerchiefs & secret cheeks of bubblegum) were graver than any

Mute marriages: the ten-ton block of ice obstructing the throat, the heart, the red filter of the liver, the clogged life.

Because she wants to touch him, she moves away. Because she wants to talk to him, she keeps silent. Because she wants to kiss him,

What makes a poet? Many have tried to guess. Is it a voice like a conduit, a plainspokenness to grief,

Living in a house near the Black Forest, without any clocks, she’s begun to listen to the walls.

She leaps into the alien heart of the passerby, the drunk, the girl who spouts Freudian talk over Szechuan food. She is part herself,

I sit at my desk alone as I did on many Sunday afternoons when you came back to me, your arms aching for me,

Endless duplication of lives and o… —Theodore Roethke I have known the imperial power of… the awesome indifference of recept… I have been intimidated by desk &a…

The lover in these poems is me; the doctor, Love. He appears

Most beautiful of poisons, border-plant, wearing your small green cowl, little friar, little murderer, aconitine flows