From “The Back Chamber”
#AmericanWriters
If he and she do not know each oth… they will not meet again; if he av… if she has grown insensible skin u… only the tribute of another’s cry;… as revenge on old lovers or famili…
when my father had been dead a wee… I woke with his voice in my ear I sat up in bed and held my breath
All winter your brute shoulders st… and steerhide over the ash hames,… sledges of cordwood for drying thr… for the Glenwood stove next winter… In April you pulled cartloads of…
Each morning I made my way among gangways, elevators, and nurses’ pods to Jane’s room to interrogate the grave helpers who tended her through the night
A storm was coming, that was why it was dark. The wind was blowing the fronds of the palm trees off. They were maples. I looked out the window across the big lawn. The house was huge, f...
December twenty-first we gather at the white Church fest… red and green, the tree flashing green-red lights beside the altar. After the children of Sunday Scho…
Mount Kearsarge shines with ice;… snow slides onto snow; no stream,… budges but remains still. Tonight we carry armloads of logs from woodshed to Glenwood and buil…
To grow old is to lose everything. Aging, everybody knows it. Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod o… when a grandfather dies.
Ruminant pillows! Gregarious soft… If one of you found a gap in a sto… the rest of you—rams, ewes, bucks,… mothers and daughters, old grandfa… cousins and aunts, small bleating…
“At pet stores in Detroit, you ca… frozen rats for seventy-five cents apiece, to… your pet boa constrictor” back home in Grosse Pointe,
Fifteen years ago his heart infarcted and he stopped smoking. At eighty he trembled like a birch but remained vigorous and acute.
When I walk in my house I see pic… bought long ago, framed and hangin… —de Kooning, Arp, Laurencin, Hen… that I’ve cherished and stared at… yet my eyes keep returning to the…
Women with hats like the rear ends… applauded you, my poems. These are the women whose husbands… who close briefcases and ask, “Wha… I look in their eyes, I tell them…
When the young husband picked up h… in the taxi one block from her tow… first lunch together, in a hotel d… with a room key in his pocket, midtown traffic gridlocked and was…
In the mid August, in the second… of my First Polar Expedition, the… almost upon us, Kantiuk and I attempted to dash the sledge along Crispin Bay, searching agai…