How I loved one like you when I was little!— With his stripes of silver and his small house of his back, Making a slow journey around the well-curb. I longed to be like him, and was, In my way, close cousin To the dirt, my knees scrubbing The gravel, my nose wetter than his. When I slip, just slightly, in the dark, I know it isn’t a wet leaf, But you, loose toe from the old life, The cold slime come into being, A fat, five-inch...
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1 The old watch: their thick eyes puff and foreclose by the moon. The young, heads trailed by the beginnings of necks, shiver, in the guarantee they shall be bodies. In the frog pond the vapor trail of a SAC bomber creeps, I hear its drone, drifting, high up in immaculate ozone. 2 And I hear, coming over the hills, America singing, her varied carols I hear: crack of deputies’ rifles practicing their aim on stray dogs at night,...
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I must tell you this young tree whose round and firm trunk between the wet pavement and the gutter (where water is trickling) rises bodily into the air with one undulant thrust half its height— and then dividing and waning sending out young branches on all sides— hung with cocoons it thins till nothing is left of it but two eccentric knotted twigs bending forward hornlike at the top (William Carlos...
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For Elizabeth Bishop Nautilus Island’s hermit heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage; her sheep still graze above the sea. Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer is first selectman in our village, she’s in her dotage. Thirsting for the hierarchic privacy of Queen Victoria’s century, she buys up all the eyesores facing her shore, and lets them fall. The season’s ill– we’ve lost our summer millionaire, who seemed to...
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For Grace Bulmer Bowers From narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea, home of the long tides where the bay leaves the sea twice a day and takes the herrings long rides, where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam depends on if it meets the bay coming in, the bay not at home; where, silted red, sometimes the sun sets facing a red sea, and others, veins the flats’ lavender, rich mud in burning rivulets; on red,...
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