How long your closet held a whiff of you, Long after hangers hung austere and bare. I would walk in and suddenly the true Sharp sweet sweat scent controlled the air And life was in that small still living breath. Where are you? since so much of you i...
Trying to remember old dreams. A voice. Who came in. And meanwhile the rain, all day, all evening, quiet steady sound. Before it grew too dark watched the blue iris leaning under the rain, the flame of the poppies guttered and went out. A voice. Almo...
AUTUMNAL Pale amber sunlight falls across The reddening October trees, That hardly sway before a breeze As soft as summer: summer's loss Seems little, dear! on days like these. Let misty autumn be our part! The twilight of the year is sweet: Where sh...
The dead do not need aspirin or sorrow, I suppose. but they might need rain. not shoes but a place to walk. not cigarettes, they tell us, but a place to burn. or we're told: space and a place to fly might be the same. the dead don't need me. nor do t...
While the burning fish is tracing his arc near the cypress, beneath the highest blue of all, and the blind boy flies away in the white stone, and the ivory poem of the green cicada beats and reverberates in the elm, let us give honor to the Lord— t...
There is a place where the sidewalk ends And before the street begins, And there the grass grows soft and white, And there the sun burns crimson bright, And there the moon-bird rests from his flight To cool in the peppermint wind. Let us leave this p...
Of course, he showed me this one afternoon when he was skipping class. When trolls cut classes, you think they are losers. When the beautiful and/or reasonably erudite do the same thing to sit on the library steps and read poetry, you think they are ...
And sometimes if I want To imagine I’m a lamb (Or a whole flock Spreading out all over the hillside So I can be a lot of happy things at the same time), It’s only because I feel what I write at sunset, Or when a cloud passes its hand over the lig...
In Poems of Love and Light: The Light of The Sun…Our Breath as One, the tenor seems to have changed slightly, as the progression of Love and lovers is, in many cases (if not all) quixotic, dependent upon mutual understanding, the conditions of the ...
Of course one’s sense of identification with the nation is inflected by all kinds of particulars, including one’s class, race, gender, and sexual identification. … But [regarding] national character …, aside from references to a national aest...
i want the moon tattooed on my wrists my grandmother keeps asking me to pray, i don’t have the heart to tell her that my poems are the only God i have left in me my mother keeps leaving without saying goodbye i wish she’d let me cut my hair in th...
I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a hot-gushing, butt-cramping, gut hosing orgasm.
Love is like the wild rose-briar; Friendship like the holly-tree. The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms, but which will bloom most constantly?
The sated day is never first The best day is a day of thirst Yes, there is goal and meaning in our path - but it is the way that is the labour's worth.
Do not be too sure, young fellows, That you are better than your ancestors.
They fought the enemy, we fight fat living and self-pity. Shine, o shine, unfalsifying sun, on this sick scene.
If seeing her an hour before her last Weak cough into all blackness I could yet Be held by chalk-white walls -
A precious, mouldering pleasure ’t is To meet an antique book, In just the dress his century wore; A privilege, I think.
Presentiment is that long shadow on the lawn Indicative that suns go down; The notice to the startled grass That darkness is about to pass.
Kindness is goodness hidden in the heart More often than declared in speech.
Lost in Hell,-Persephone, Take her head upon your knee; Say to her, "My dear, my dear, It is not so dreadful here.
