House on the Bluff
In winter you strapped the canoe
to the basement ceiling,
every rib written in silt.
Every year the huge lake froze,
ice figures clawed
and covered the pier.
Even in summer we shivered with cold,
my two brothers and I,…
Poetry
Cartoon
Two hundred frames in, you decide the sketches
are too shaky once set in motion. You throw them
in the garbage, dump your spaghetti on top so
there would be no way to salvage them. This repeats
again, except the …
Which Is a Matter of Gathering
1.
Belief in story is a belief
in travel or trouble—
a newborn becoming
unmoved by his conscience,
a vocabulary collecting
2.
reason by slow degrees.
Suppose it’s not fear
but how we spend our …
Thaw
Translated from Polish by Piotr Florczyk & Boris Dralyuk
Thaw. Oasis of rotten grass, of concrete; puddles.
A dirty snowman in the neighbor’s garden. In front of the house,
the neighbor himself: a shadow in overalls, chewed up by his …
The Six Million Dollar Poem
We could have spent all day
on that esplanade watching citizens
set fire to our favorite bridge,
but we needed to master
our summer looks,
and how many landmarks
must be destroyed
before our thirst for belligerent
celebration is quelled?…
From Bird To Kill
You had been the last of the boys
to learn how to slaughter properly.
Said I would do it for you. To this,
you placed a warm palm against
my back and pushed me away.
Poised above the stained block, …
Picasso’s Mask by Andre Malraux
On page 89 I was thinking about Picasso’s collection.
Not one impressionist painting,
not one painting in which light plays any part.
Not even in the admirable Cezanne,
not even in the large Renoir.
I could see in my mind’s …
carrots
thin rug of carrots
on the road broken carrots
children carry carrots
like little torches
one girl eats a carrot
tops of carrots
on the road a carrot
carried by a bone-thin dog
he is thin enough
not to know…
Grave
One could do worse than an unmarked stone.
In leaf time it looks even more gray
and in the snow
who knows how covered it could remain.
No one to visit and no one to know.
The noon sits down …
Daddy Came Home to the War
One year after a segregated air force
discharged my father, honest and faithful
service completed, he married my mother.
No shotguns or dishonor, just doing right,
onlookers all bearing witness with one eye
open. So many of the flames in …