Poet, essayist, and naturalist, Diane Ackerman is the author of two dozen highly acclaimed works of nonfiction and poetry, including The Zookeeper’s Wife and A Natural History of the Senses.
Poetry
Summer 2002
The Savant of Sunflowers, the Apprentice of Roses
Something in a rose knows to spread its roots into a stable base, how to shimmy up a trellis, graft onto reliable stock, open up rich with scent, and slowly […]
Poetry
Winter 1988
Soft Lens
Water held by a curve, it bridges the invisible oceans of light with a single continent, is fragile as dust, yet anchors the Mayan profile of the moon among night-swarming […]
Poetry
Winter 1988
Aviatrix
In dawn’s feathered light, a lady cardinal hurls herself against my bedroom window. Hallucinations stalk the glass as she slams her softness into the flat, cold world, trying to perch […]
Poetry
Winter 1988
At Walt Whitman’s Birthplace, Huntington, Long Island
At night, before the dark swells of sleep, Walt, I think of your strong arms that embrace whole cities, vast membranes of streetlamp and neon, lit by the inner electric […]
Poetry
Summer 1986
Intensive Care
In the antiseptic Eden,your small light burns:a green dotroaming the fluorescenttwilightlike a cometthe halls of evening:a pulsethat carried youacross two continents,from coal-mining village,cricket for the county,and Oxford ribbons,to picturesque America,where […]
Poetry
Summer 1986
Amber
Liquid memory, how gold the prisontrapping this fly undecayed in sunlight,anatomy perfect as any time traveler’s.Once it feasted on rump of mastodon,then sought shade on a nearby ginkgo tree.Caught unaware […]
Voices in American Poetry
Summer 1984
Night on the Nile
Steep central among the bridgesas if in the sternum of a vast ribcage, the viewfrom my window is peril-lessand perfect: a strategemof lights that blacken the sky. The city is […]
Voices in American Poetry
Summer 1984
Silhouette
Nightwing, you live in coffinsby day, a mortuary scribewriting ads for guiltabstract as leached bone,with words like “perpetual,”“always,” and “everlasting,”words too mineralto risk whole with a lover.To feed your art,you […]
Voices in American Poetry
Summer 1984
Lines Written in a Pittsburgh Skyscraper
It has taken me three yearsto come to this view.I know now that the bodyis a river, whose bones and musclesand organs are flowing.I have watched their shapesin the molded […]
Poetry
Autumn 1982
Zoë
Ultimate immigrant, who passed through the Ellis Island of your mother's hips, with a name slit loose from its dialect of cell and bone: welcome to the citadel of our […]
Poetry
Autumn 1981
A Red Carillon Whose Berries Are Bells
Because rain fell early and long this summer, the yard spawned hundreds of wild strawberries: pendent hearts below a canopy of leaves, whose sawtooth edge we learned to spot from […]
Poetry
Autumn 1981
Sleeping Beauty of the Bronx
Dearest friend, dead to me by time’s present fiction: I read your plight weekly through the dream whorl of print, how they pox your face and arms with high-strung electrodes, […]
Poetry
Winter 1980
A Fine, a Private Place
He took her one day under the blue horizon where long sea fingers parted like beads hitched in the doorway of an opium den, and canyons mazed the deep reef […]
Fall 2012
The Savant of Sunflowers,
The Apprentice of Roses
Something in a rose
knows to spread its roots
into a stable base,
how to shimmy up a trellis,
graft onto reliable stock,
open up rich with scent,
and slowly unfold another
flush of tawny bloom.