From “The Back Chamber”
#AmericanWriters
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 ...
Fifteen years ago his heart infarcted and he stopped smoking. At eighty he trembled like a birch but remained vigorous and acute.
It has happened suddenly, by surprise, in an arbor, or while drinking good coffee, after speaking, or before, that I dumbly inhabit
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.
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…
A woman who lived in a tree caught the moon in a kettle. The wind on the roof of the tree thumped
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…
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…
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
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…
To grow old is to lose everything. Aging, everybody knows it. Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod o… when a grandfather dies.
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.
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…
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
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…