Poetry
Spring 1969
On a Kite Our Son Left in Alaska
What we loosed pretended to get away, then rode willingly, still in the sky. We knew that air was passing all the time like someone’s hand, to make that level […]
Poetry
Autumn/ September 1967
For a Friend I Never Found
This picture develops in absolute silence. On the wall above my desk someone I missed fades in, waits below the surface, and goes with me by float steps back through […]
Poetry
Autumn 1965
Father, His Friend, and Another
Father’s friend Ray at the planing mill worked wood the color of afternoon air, curls of it clasping everything there—like the legs of the saw that mumbled at first, and […]
Poetry
Summer 1965
Observation Car and Cigar
Tranquility as his breath, his eye a camera that believes, he follows rails that only last one trip, then vanish. (Suppose America tried and then was the West once more, […]
Poetry
Autumn 1963
Scenario
Wind says, “Great Slave Lake” mornings at 3.00. I am awake on that wave length because with my life I explore where winter lives, and it lies ready all night […]
Poetry
Autumn 1963
Successful Person
Invent your life; assemble it by string inside a bottle like a ship. Toss it in the tide, and when it sails the storm nothing touches that rigging. Doll on […]
Poetry
Autumn 1963
The Day after Then
He adjusted the blinds for the morning sun; office-floor-wide the light streaks ran. His things there—where had their value gone? Cold it was, cold at his work. He could hold […]
Poetry
Autumn 1960
Adults Only
Animals own a fur world; people own worlds that are variously, pleasingly, bare. And the way these worlds are once arrived for us kids with a jolt, that night when […]
Poetry
Autumn 1960
A Script
Befall this room be scene, that Now be time, that half the cast be you: the plot is what we have to do. Suppose that you had come, knocked once, […]
Poetry
Spring 1965
The Unreachable Sun
From the Spanish. You used to open seasons in which spring would invade us through the smallest wound; the planet would revolve, a room of waiting; the roosters would […]
Poetry
Spring 1965
9
From the Spanish. They tell me that things are going too badly, that men are filing crucifixes to kill each other and beneath the mattresses of cradles are found weapons […]
Poetry
Autumn/ November 1967
Quarrel
to Rafael Menaez Translated from the Spanish In the middle of the canyon the switchblade knives of Albacete, prettied with a foeman’s blood, scatter and shine like little fish. A […]
Poetry
Autumn/ September 1967
It Is Night, in My Study
It is night in my study. The deepest solitude; I hear the steady shudder in my breast –for it feels all alone, and blanched by my mind–and I hear my […]
Poetry
Spring 1965
The Clown’s Farewell
From the Spanish. My clothes of colored dust were crumpled, I returned my costume to the bottom of the sea; blind I stayed next to the pool, next to […]