From “The Back Chamber”
#AmericanWriters
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
The clock of my days winds down. The cat eats sparrows outside my w… Once, she brought me a small rabbi… which we devoured together, under the Empire Table
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.
Some days, when you read the newspaper, it seems clear that the United States is a country devoted to poetry. You can delude yourself reading the sports pages. After finding two referen...
It has happened suddenly, by surprise, in an arbor, or while drinking good coffee, after speaking, or before, that I dumbly inhabit
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 ...
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…
Pale gold of the walls, gold of the centers of daisies, yellow… pressing from a clear bowl. All da… we lay on the bed, my hand stroking the deep
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
Fifteen years ago his heart infarcted and he stopped smoking. At eighty he trembled like a birch but remained vigorous and acute.
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.
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…
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…
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…