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...
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 allappear to have speed lines trailing behind usas we rush alo...
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...
It seems only yesterday I used to believe
I could feel the day offering itself to me,and I wanted nothing morethan to be in the moment-but which moment?Not that one, or that one, or that one,
Hangover If I were crowned emperor this morning, every child who is playing Marco Polo in the swimming pool of this motel, shouting the name Marco Polo back and forth Marco Polo Marco Polo would be re...
And I should mention the light which falls through the big windows this time of dayitalicizing everything it touches...
I ask them to take a poemand hold it up to the lightlike a color slideor press an ear against its hive.I say drop a mouse into a poemand watch him probe his way out,or walk inside the poem's roomand f...
Thank-You NotesUnder the vigilant eye of my motherI had to demonstrate my best penmanshipBy thanking Uncle Gerry for the toy soldiers–Little red members of the Coldstream Guards–And thanking Aunt Hele...
All they want to dois tie the poem to a chair with ropeand torture a confession out of it.They begin beating it with a hoseto find out what it really means.
This is not what it is like to be you,I realized as a few of your magnificent cloudsflew over the rooftop.It is just me thinking about being you.And before I headed back down the hill,I walked in a ci...
On Turning TenThe 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 spir...
And I cannot tell youhow vastly my loneliness was deepened,how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,when I found on one pagea few greasy looking smearsand next to them, written in soft pe...
The LanyardThe other day I was ricocheting slowlyoff the blue walls of this room,moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,when I found myself i...
But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her, barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my windowin one of the fragile cotton dresses of the poor.She will look in at me with her thin arms extend...
To My Favorite 17-Year-Old High School Girl 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...
In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok you would never see him doing such a thing,tossing the dry snow over the mountainof his bare, round shoulder, his hair tied in a knot,a model of...
GraveWhat do you think of my new glassesI asked as I stood under a shade treebefore the joined grave of my parents,and what followed was a long silencethat descended on the rows of the dead and on the...
But earlier this week on a wooded path,I thought the swans afloat on the reservoirwere the true geniuses,the ones who had figured out how to fly,how to be both beautiful and brutal,and how to mate for...