August, goldenrod blowing. We walk into the graveyard, to find my grandfather’s grave. Ten years ago I came here last, bringing marigolds from the round garden outside the kitchen. I didn’t know you then. We walk
Who was my teacher at Harvard. Did not wear overcoat Saying to me as we walked across the Yard Cold brittle autumn is you should be wearing overcoat. I said You are not wearing overcoat. He said, You should do as I say not do as I do. Just how American it was and how late Forties it was Delmore, but not I, was probably aware. He quoted Finnegans Wake to me In his New York apartment sitting on chair
Look! From my window there’s a view of city streets where only lives as dry as tortoises can crawl—the Gallapagos of desire.
There is the day of Negroes with red hair and the day of insane women on the subway; there is the day of the word Trieste and the night of the blind man with the electric guitar.
This old house lodges no ghosts! Those swaggering specters who found their way Across the Atlantic Were left behind With their old European grudges In the farmhouses of New England And Pennsylvania Like so much jettisoned baggage
One of those appointments you postpone until anxiety propels you to the phone, then have to wait too long for, to take an inconvenient time . . . Late in the day, an old man and I watch the minute hand
on the waiting room wall. I’ve papers to grade, but he wants someone to talk to, and his attendant’s rude, so he turns
Orange peels, burned letters, the car lights shining on the grass, everything goes somewhere—and everything we do—nothing ever disappears. But changes. The roar of the sun in photographs. Inching shorelines. Ice lines. The cells of our skin; our meetings, our solitudes. Our eyes.
A bee careens at the window here; flies out, released: a life without harm, without shame. That woman, my friend, circling against her life, a married life; that man, my friend,
The women were divided between regrets for the homes they had left and fear of the deserts and savages before them. —Francis Parkman nothing but this continent intent on its dismay—
There is no widening distance at the shore— The sea revolving slowly from the piers— But the one border of our take-off roar And we are mounted on the hemispheres.
Above the waning moon whose almanac We wait to finish continents away, The Northern stars already call us back, And silence folds like maps on all we say.
based on an old photograph bought in a shop at Half Moon Bay, summer, 1999 No sound, the whole thing. Unknown folk. People waving from a hillside of ripple grass
writings on the wall * I was the one who said the ditch in the backyard was maybe a river that had flowed from somewhere else and was flowing to somewhere else * I was the one who said where are you now?
I have been enjoying the law and order of our community throughout the past three months since my wife and I, our two cats, and miscellaneous photographs of the six grandchildren belonging to our previous neighbors (with whom we were very close) arrived in Saratoga Springs which is clearly prospering under your custody
1. Prurient tapirs gamboled on our lawns, But that was quite some time ago. Now one is accosted by asthmatic bulldogs, Sluggish in the hedges, ruminant.
Moving through ivy in the park Near drying waterfalls, we open every gate; But that grave, shell-white unicorn is gone.
I sit where I always sit, in back of the Buddha, Red leather wing chair, pony skin trunk under my feet, Sky light above me, Chinese and Indian rugs on the floor. 1 March, 1998, where to begin again?
Over there's the ur-photograph, Giorgio Morandi, glasses pushed up on his forehead, Looking hard at four objects— Two olive oil tins, one wine bottle, one flower vase, A universe of form and structure,
The universe constricting in front of his eyes, angelic orders And applications scraped down
On my desk there is a stone with the word “Amen” on it, a triangular fragment of stone from a Jewish graveyard destroyed many generations ago. The other fragments, hundreds upon hundreds, were scattered helter-skelter, and a great yearning, a longing without end, fills them all: first name in search of family name, date of death seeks dead man’s birthplace, son’s name wishes to locate name of father, date of birth seeks reunion with soul
When news came that your mother’d smashed her hip, both feet caught in rungs of the banquet table, our wedding rebroken on the memory of the long lake of silence when the stones of her body broke as an Irish fence of stones, I saw your wet dugs drag
Comment form: