From “The Back Chamber”
#Americans
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
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…
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…
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…
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...
If he and she do not know each oth… they will not meet again; if he av… if she has grown insensible skin u… only the tribute of another’s cry;… as revenge on old lovers or famili…
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…
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 ...
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…
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 ...
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
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…
Fifteen years ago his heart infarcted and he stopped smoking. At eighty he trembled like a birch but remained vigorous and acute.
“Even when I danced erect by the Nile’s garden I constructed Necropolis. Ten million fellaheen cells of my body floated stones