From “The Back Chamber”
#AmericanWriters
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
“At pet stores in Detroit, you ca… frozen rats for seventy-five cents apiece, to… your pet boa constrictor” back home in Grosse Pointe,
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…
Fifteen years ago his heart infarcted and he stopped smoking. At eighty he trembled like a birch but remained vigorous and acute.
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
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…
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…
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.
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 ...
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 ...
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.
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
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...
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…