And when my heart is beatingtoo rapidly in the dark,I will go downstairs in a robe,open it up to a blank page,
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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
No wonder you rise in the middle of the nightto look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem that you used to know by...
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...
I had to send away for thebeacuse they are not available in any store.They look the same as any sunglasses with a light tint and silvery frames,but instead of filtering out the harmfulrays of the sun....
Central Park It’s hard to describe how that day in the park was altered when I stopped to read an official sign I came across near the great carousel, my lips moving silently like the lips of Saint Am...
But some nights, I must tell you,I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep.I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness.I sing a love song as well as I can,lost for a while in the home of the...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
Today I pass the time readinga favorite haiku,saying the few words over and over.It feels like eatingthe same small, perfect grapeagain and again.I walk through the house reciting itand leave its lett...
One burst after another as my wife turned in her sleep. I was a single monkey trying to type the opening lines of my Hamlet,