Great are the Hittites. Their ears have mice and mice have… Their dogs bury themselves and lea… To guard the house. A single weed… Until the spiderwebs spread over t…

Where the path to the lake twists… A puff of dust, the kind bare feet… Is what I saw in the dying light, Night swooping down everywhere els… A low branch heavy with leaves

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

On the first page of my dreambook It’s always evening In an occupied country. Hour before the curfew. A small provincial city.

Enter without knocking, hard-worki… I’m just sitting here mulling over What to do this dark, overcast day… It was a night of the radio turned… Fitful sleep, vague, troubling dre…

The truth is dark under your eyeli… What are you going to do about it? The birds are silent; there’s no o… All day long you’ll squint at the… When the wind blows you’ll shiver…

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

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…

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…

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… •

The one who had been whispering All along in this empty theater And whose voice I just heard— Or imagined I did Distracted as I was by my own tho…

And the one that’s got it in for y… Mister, that keeps taunting you In an old man’s morning wheeze Every time you so much as glance a… Or blurt something in your defense…

The mail truck goes down the coast Carrying a single letter. At the end of a long pier The bored seagull lifts a leg now… And forgets to put it down.

A New Version: 1980 What is that little black thing I… in the white? Walt Whitman One