In the freakish pink and gray of dawn I tookhis death to bed with me and his death was my bedand in every corner of the room it hid from the light,and then it was the light of day and the next dayand...
I Love You'Early on, I noticed that you always say itto each of your childrenas you are getting off the phone with themjust as you never fail to say itto me whenever we arrive at the end of a call.It'...
The trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry...
It is possible to be struck by a meteoror a single-engine planewhile reading in a chair at home.Safes drop from rooftopsand flatten the odd pedestrianmostly within the panels of the comics,but still,...
When I was a young man, I understood that poetry was two things - it was difficult to understand, but you could understand that the poet was miserable. So for a while there, I wrote poems that were ha...
Perhaps the answer is simply one:one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,a small jazz combo working in the background.She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautifuleyes closed, and the...
This is what I think aboutwhen I shovel compostinto a wheelbarrow,and when I fill the long flower boxes,then press into rowsthe limp roots of red impatiens—the instant hand of Deathalways ready to bur...
This is the beginning. Almost anything can happen. This is where you find the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land, the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page. Think of an egg, the lett...
The name of the author is the first to gofollowed obediently by the title, the plot,the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novelwhich suddenly becomes one you have never read,never even heard of,as...
Just pour the tea, just look into the eye of the flower, just sing the song— one thing at a time and
Eastern Standard TimePoetry speaks to all people, it is said,but here I would like to addressonly those in my own time zone,this proper slice of longitudethat runs from pole to snowy poledown the glob...
And when my heart is beatingtoo rapidly in the dark,I will go downstairs in a robe,open it up to a blank page,
Saw him looking up at her and what she was doing the way the eyes of saints are painted when they are looking up at God when he is doing something remarkable, something that identifies him as God.
These days every morning begins like a joke you think you have heard before, but there is no one telling it whom you can stop. One day it's about a cow who walks into a bar, then about a man with a bi...
No Time In a rush this weekday morning, I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetery where my parents lie buried side by side under a smooth slab of granite. Then, all day long, I think of him rising u...
In a while, one of us will go up to bedand the other one will follow.Then we will slip below the surface of the nightinto miles of water, drifting down and downto the dark, soundless bottomuntil the w...
The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?' That's the real question for me, is getting the rea...
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...
In a rush this weekday morning,I tap the horn as I speed past the cemeterywhere my parents are buriedside by side beneath a slab of smooth granite.Then, all day, I think of him rising upto give me tha...
I would rather eat at the bar,but such behavior is regardedby professionals as a form of denial,so here I am seated aloneat a table with a white tableclothattended by an elderly waiter with no name–id...