#Americans
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…
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
August, goldenrod blowing. We wal… into the graveyard, to find my grandfather’s grave. Ten years… I came here last, bringing marigolds from the round garden
In October of the year, he counts potatoes dug from the br… counting the seed, counting the cellar’s portion out, and bags the rest on the cart’s fl…
It has happened suddenly, by surprise, in an arbor, or while drinking good coffee, after speaking, or before, that I dumbly inhabit
My son, my executioner, I take you in my arms, Quiet and small and just astir And whom my body warms. Sweet death, small son, our instru…
“At pet stores in Detroit, you ca… frozen rats for seventy-five cents apiece, to… your pet boa constrictor” back home in Grosse Pointe,
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…
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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...
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…
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…
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