O Canada I have not forgotten you,as I kneel in my canoe, beholding this visionof a bookcase.You are the paddle, the snowshoe, the cabin in the pines.You are the moose in the clearing and the moosehea...
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...
You are turning melike someone turning a globe in her hand,and yes, I have another side like a China no one,not even me, has ever seen.So describe to me what's there,say what you are looking atand I w...
It seems only yesterday I used to believethere was nothing under my skin but light.If you cut me I could shine.
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...
I'm happy to stick with my persona. There are themes of love lost and love regained, but the main themes of all poems are basically love and death, and that seems to be the message of poetry.
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,skirmishes against the authorraging along the borders of every pagein tiny black script.If I could just get my hands on you,Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,they...
I thanked everyone whose job it ever was to lay hands on the skin of strangers, and I gave general thanks that I was lying facedown in a warm puddle of soap and not a warm puddle of blood in some corn...
It might interest you to know,speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,that I am the sound of rain on the roof.I also happen to be the shooting star,the evening paper blowing down an alleyand th...
The Death of Allegory I am wondering what became of all those tall abstractions that used to pose, robed and statuesque, in paintings and parade about on the pages of the Renaissance displaying their...
The Sandhill Cranes of Nebraska Too bad you weren’t here six months ago, was a lament I heard on my visit to Nebraska. You could have seen the astonishing spectacle of the sandhill cranes, thousands o...
Vade MecumI want the scissors to be sharpand the table perfectly levelwhen you cut me out of my lifeand paste me in that book you always carry.
We must always look at things from the point of view of eternity, the college theologians used to insist, from which, I imagine, we would all appear to have speed lines trailing behind us as we rush a...
No one here likes a wet dog.
Cheerios One bright morning in a restaurant in Chicago as I waited for my eggs and toast, I opened the Tribune only to discover that I was the same age as Cheerios. Indeed, I was a few months older th...
C’è nessuno che voglia unirsi a me nel lanciare alcuni sassi verso quegli insegnanti che amano porre la domanda: «Che cosa sta cercando di dire il poeta?» come se Thomas Hardy e Emily Dickinson si fos...
Do you realize that if you had started building the Parthenon on the day you were born you would be all done in only one more year? Of course, you couldn’t have done it alone, so never mind, you’re fi...
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...
It seems only yesterday I used to believe
Old Man Eating Alone in a Chinese Restaurant I am glad I resisted the temptation, if it was a temptation when I was young, to write a poem about an old man eating alone at a corner table in a Chinese...
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