From “The Back Chamber”
#AmericanWriters
A woman who lived in a tree caught the moon in a kettle. The wind on the roof of the tree thumped
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
Fifteen years ago his heart infarcted and he stopped smoking. At eighty he trembled like a birch but remained vigorous and acute.
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 ...
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
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…
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
Katie could put her feet behind he… Or do a grand plié, position two, Her suppleness magnificent in bed. I strained my lower back, and Kat… Only a little, doing what we could…
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…
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.
“Even when I danced erect by the Nile’s garden I constructed Necropolis. Ten million fellaheen cells of my body floated stones
It has happened suddenly, by surprise, in an arbor, or while drinking good coffee, after speaking, or before, that I dumbly inhabit
“Up, down, good, bad,” said the man with the tubes up his nose, " there’s lots of variety… However, notions
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…