Father studied theology through th… And this was exam time. Mother knitted. I sat quietly wit… Full of pictures. Night fell. My hands grew cold touching the fa…

It seemed the kind of life we want… Wild strawberries and cream in the… Sunlight in every room. The two of us walking by the sea n… Some evenings, however, we found o…

Here come my night thoughts On crutches, Returning from studying the heaven… What they thought about Stayed the same,

There was a melon fresh from the g… So ripe the knife slurped As it cut it into six slices. The children were going back to sc… Their mother, passing out paper pl…

You give the appearance of listeni… To my thoughts, o trees, Bent over the road I am walking On a late summer evening When every one of you is a steep s…

The obvious is difficult To prove. Many prefer The hidden. I did, too. I listened to the trees. They had a secret

The night still frightens you. You know it is interminable And of vast, unimaginable dimensio… “That’s because His insomnia is p… You’ve read some mystic say.

Your mother carried you Out of the smoking ruins of a buil… And set you down on this sidewalk Like a doll bundled in burnt rags, Where you now stood years later

for Hayden Carruth If you didn’t see the six-legged d… It doesn’t matter. We did, and he mostly lay in the c… As for the extra legs,

With only his dim lantern To tell him where he is And every time a mountain Of fresh corpses to load up Take them to the other side

On the road with billowing poplars… In a country flat and desolate To the far-off gray horizon, where… A man and a woman went on foot, Each carrying a small suitcase.

In my great grandmother’s time, All one needed was a broom To get to see places And give the geese a chase in the… •

Of the light in my room: Its mood swings, Dark-morning glooms, Summer ecstasies. Spider on the wall,

You must come to them sideways In rooms webbed in shadow, Sneak a view of their emptiness Without them catching A glimpse of you in return.

To find clues where there are none… That’s my job now, I said to the Dictionary on my desk. The world… My window has grown illegible, And so has the clock on the wall.