First frost, and I walk among the rose-fruit, the marble toes Of the Greek beauties you brought Off Europe’s relic heap To sweeten your neck of the New York woods.…
Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts. Nor the woman in the ambulance Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly – A gift, a love gift…
Little poppies, little hell flames, Do you do no harm? You flicker. I cannot touch you. I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns And it exhausts me to…
A dream tree, Polly’s tree: a thicket of sticks, each speckled twig ending in a thin-paned leaf unlike any other on it or in a ghost flower flat as paper…
From Water-Tower Hill to the brick prison The shingle booms, bickering under The sea’s collapse. Snowcakes break and welter. This year The gritted wave leaps The seawall and drops onto…
The word, defining, muzzles; the drawn line Ousts mistier peers and thrives, murderous, In establishments which imagined lines Can only haunt. Sturdy as potatoes, Stones, without conscience, word and line…
You said you would kill it this morning. Do not kill it. It startles me still, The jut of that odd, dark head, pacing Through the uncut grass on the…
The Triumph of Wit Over Suffering Head alone shows you in the prodigious act Of digesting what centuries alone digest: The mammoth, lumbering statuary of sorrow, Indissoluble enough to riddle…
On this bald hill the new year hones its edge. Faceless and pale as china The round sky goes on minding its business. Your absence is inconspicuous; Nobody can tell…