From “The Back Chamber”
#AmericanWriters
Fifteen years ago his heart infarcted and he stopped smoking. At eighty he trembled like a birch but remained vigorous and acute.
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,
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.
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
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
A woman who lived in a tree caught the moon in a kettle. The wind on the roof of the tree thumped
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…
“Even when I danced erect by the Nile’s garden I constructed Necropolis. Ten million fellaheen cells of my body floated stones
In October of the year, he counts potatoes dug from the br… counting the seed, counting the cellar’s portion out, and bags the rest on the cart’s fl…
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…
1. Baseball, I warrant, is not… occupation of the aging boy. Far from it: There are cats and r… there is her water body. She fills the skin of her legs up, like wate…
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 ...
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…