The first speaker said Fear fire. Fear furnaces Incinerators, the city dump The faint scratch of a match. The second speaker said

The winter apples have been picked… Rain and wind have picked the mapl… The last of them now bank the hous… None are left upon the trees or on… Green and tall as ever it grew in…

Two boys uncoached are tossing a p… Overhand, underhand, backhand, sle… Teasing with attitudes, latitudes,… High, make him fly off the ground… Make him scoop it up, make him as-…

A seated statue of himself he seem… A bronze slowness becomes him. Pa… The page he contemplates he doesn’… The lesson, the long lesson, has b… His mind holds summer, as his skin…

Keep me from going to sleep too so… Or if I go to sleep too soon Come wake me up. Come any hour Of night. Come whistling up the r… Stomp on the porch. Bang on the d…

Four Tao philosophers as cedar wa… chat on a February berry bush in sun, and I am one. Such merriment and such sobriety— the small wild fruit on the tall s…

Words of a poem should be glass But glass so simple-subtle its sha… Is nothing but the shape of what i… A glass spun for itself is empty, Brittle, at best Venetian trinket…

Amherst never had a witch O Coos or of Grafton But once upon a time There were three old women. One wore a small beard

Poised between going on and back,… Both ways taut like a tightrope-wa… Fingertips pointing the opposites, Now bouncing tiptoe like a dropped… Or a kid skipping rope, come on, c…

Lingo of birds was easier than lin… they were elusive, though, the bir… He thought of Virgil, Virgil who… History he never forgave for letti… lapse into Italian, a renegade jab…

Winter uses all the blues there ar… One shade of blue for water, one f… Another blue for shadows over snow… The clear or cloudy sky uses blue… Both different blues. And hills r…

Searock his tower above the sea, Searock he built, not ivory. Searock as well his haunted art Who gave to plunging hawks his hea… He loved to stand upon his head

My mind matches this understand la… Outdoors the pencilled tree, the w… Indoors the constant fire, the car… Are facts that I accept and under… I have brought in red berries and…