From “The Back Chamber”
#AmericanWriters
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 ...
Fifteen years ago his heart infarcted and he stopped smoking. At eighty he trembled like a birch but remained vigorous and acute.
A woman who lived in a tree caught the moon in a kettle. The wind on the roof of the tree thumped
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 ...
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
“Even when I danced erect by the Nile’s garden I constructed Necropolis. Ten million fellaheen cells of my body floated stones
1. Baseball, I warrant, is not… occupation of the aging boy. Far from it: There are cats and r… there is her water body. She fills the skin of her legs up, like wate…
Ruminant pillows! Gregarious soft… If one of you found a gap in a sto… the rest of you—rams, ewes, bucks,… mothers and daughters, old grandfa… cousins and aunts, small bleating…
“Up, down, good, bad,” said the man with the tubes up his nose, " there’s lots of variety… However, notions
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
Twelve people, most of us stranger… in Ann Arbor, drinking Cribari fr… Then two young men, who cooked him… carry him to the table on a large square of plywood: his…
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…
When the young husband picked up h… in the taxi one block from her tow… first lunch together, in a hotel d… with a room key in his pocket, midtown traffic gridlocked and was…
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...