The young are quick of speech. Grown middle-aged, I teach Corrosion and distrust, Exacting what I must. A poem is what stands

The grandeur of deep afternoons, The pomp of haze on marble hills, Where every white-walled villa swo… Through violence that heat fulfill… Pass tirelessly and more alone

I, one who never speaks, Listened days in summer trees, Each day a rustling leaf. Then, in time, my unbelief Grew like my running—

You would extend the mind beyond t… Furious, bending, suffering in thi… And unpoetic dicta; you have been Forced by hypothesis to fiercer fa… As metal singing hard, with firmne…

The night was faint and sheer; Immobile, road and dune. Then, for a moment, clear, A plane moved past the moon. O spirit cool and frail,

Where am I now? And what Am I to say portends? Death is but death, and not The most obtuse of ends. No matter how one leans

The calloused grass lies hard Against the cracking plain: Life is a grayish stain; The salt-marsh hems my yard. Dry dikes rise hill on hill;

Reptilian green the wrinkled throa… Green as a bough of yew the beard; He bent his head, and so I smote; Then for a thought my vision clear… The head dropped clean; he rose an…

The branches, jointed, pointing up and out, shine out like brass. Upon the heavy

Snake River Country I now remembered slowly how I cam… I, sometime living, sometime with… Creeping by iron ways across the b… Wastes of Wyoming, turning in des…

Dear Emily, my tears would burn y… But for the fire-dry line that mak… Burning my eyes, my fingers, while… Singly the words that crease my he… If I could make some tortured pil…

I was the patriarch of the shining… Of the blond summer and metallic g… Men vanished at the motion of my h… And when I beckoned they would co… The earth grew dense with grain at…

Amid the iris and the rose, The honeysuckle and the bay, The wild earth for a moment goes In dust or weed another way. Small though its corner be, the we…

On the desert, between pale mounta… Far whispers creeping through an a… Coyote, on delicate mocking feet, Hovers down the canyon, among the… His voice running wild in the wind…