When i believe in everything, I could not seethe actors semicircled around a studio microphoneflipping the pages of scripts in unison.I only heard the voices, resonant, electric, adult,accusing each o...
You know the parlor trick.wrap your arms around your own bodyand from the back it looks likesomeone is embracing youher hands grasping your shirther fingernails teasing your neckfrom the front it is a...
It was getting late in the year, the sky had been low and overcast for days, and I was drinking tea in a glassy room with a woman without children, a gate through which no one had entered the world. S...
I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves, Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son, each one st...
The whole idea of it makes me feellike I'm coming down with something,something worse than any stomach acheor the headaches I get from reading in bad light--a kind of measles of the spirit,a mumps of...
Would pass in the street, mostly people whose existence I did not believe in,
The boy at the far end of the train car kept looking behind him as if he were afraid or expecting someone
My favorite time to write is in the late afternoon,weekdays, particularly Wednesday. This is how I go about it:I take a fresh pot of tea into my study and close the door.Then I remove my clothes and l...
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.
Some honor Cummings as the granddaddy of all American innovators in poetry and ascribe to him a diverse progeny that includes virtually any poet who considers the page a field and allows silence to be...
You, ReaderI wonder how you are going to feelwhen you find outthat I wrote this instead of you, that it was I who got up earlyto sit in the itchenand mention with a penthe rain-soaked windows,the ivy...
On Not Finding You at HomeUsually you appear at the front doorwhen you hear my steps on the gravel,but today the door was closed,not a wisp of pale smoke from the chimney.I peered into a windowbut the...
It seems only yesterday I used to believethere was nothing under my skin but light.If you cut me I could shine.But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,I skin my knees. I bleed.
Is Death miles away from this house,Reaching for a window in CincinnatiOr breathing down the neck of a lost hikerIn British Columbia?Is he too busy making arrangments, Tampering with air brakes, Scatt...
A lasting marriage, they say, is one where the two reach for different sections of the Sunday paper. Me, I go right for the obituaries, just like those very elderly characters in Muriel Spark's spooky...
If you look a word up in the dictionary and twenty minutes later you're still wandering around in the dictionary, you probably have the most basic equipment you need to be a poet.
Just as the hare is zipping across the finish line,the tortoise has stopped once againby the roadside,this time to stick out his neckand nibble a bit of sweet grass,unlike the previous timewhen he was...
Now I sit down at the desk, ready to begin.I am entirely pure: nothing but a skeleton at a typewriter.I should mention that sometimes I leave my penis on. I find it difficult to ignore the temptation....
We love, you know, children love the ingredients of poetry. And then they go into this tunnel that we call adolescence, and when they come out of it, they hate poetry.
You trip over a word while carryinga tray of vocabulary out to the poolonly to discover that broken glassis a good topic.