Old people can’t write poetry. Only those who think and live and feel and praise and swear and fight and love and give birth to babies can give birth to poems. Not old people. No dear old lady living in retirement with a shawl around her shoulders, living among . . . . Continue Reading »
Dante and Michelangelo You were here; Brunelleschi, Donatello, Savonarola, the Medici, Machiavelli, Ghiberti, Leonardo da Vinci—All left their mark; But none is so vividly present As the Florentine dogs As I walk these ancient streets. Looking . . . . Continue Reading »
There! He’s one of the first onstage! A less disheveled crowd than usual . . . Under those lights he probably can’t see us. His son took his place on the top row of risers. . . . sheepishly enduring the scattered applause until the other choristers had filed on. The conductor is grey-haired. A . . . . Continue Reading »
Summertime on Mama Bell’s back stoop,it always started with someone saying, “Your mama don’t wear no drawers”—school kids playing the dozens— and we’d fall over laughing, pretending to look up some lady’s skirt, until a boy would say, “Well, your . . . . Continue Reading »
“There was a bole of an olive tree with long leaves growing Strongly in the courtyard, and it was thick, like a column. I laid down my chamber around this.” The Odyssey, Book XXIII Where but in bed does the world begin. Where man and woman know, like children. By touch and taste, by gentlest . . . . Continue Reading »
Up and down the oneway streets of houses huddled deep and close together, sycamores, live oaks brace up to the concrete, break through, their dark roots surfacing, disrupting the order of a New Orleans neighborhood. A block away the laughter, the games belong to black . . . . Continue Reading »
Now, in April, when lilacs shake in gusts of rain, the crown-like buds Waving thick and green on sceptre tips, I ask myself: What have we been. We two curled tight in winter’s dark? And when lilacs fully unfurl themselves. Their heart-shaped leaves. Their fragrant . . . . Continue Reading »
“Sherman Led by Victory” Is a St. Gaudens statue, A cast-bronze allegory. With Victory as a woman Pulling his horse’s bridle Out of a sculptor’s stable. Leading him off the pedestal Into a bronze fable. I used to think Sherman A beautiful . . . . Continue Reading »
I I have been considering the ravens, who live without worrying and have no bins or barns And have no reaping machines. Yet they are fed well—their bodies sleek, gloved in black silk. With what a minor tempest They startle and settle, yet they are the poets of motion. Like folk songs their . . . . Continue Reading »
the wind's blown stars to powder in the sky's blueso the morning's pale and clear, soft as breath,those are storms' leavings,these horizons swept clean. we fill, we empty we connect and retract and sometimes each dream, every cell . . . . Continue Reading »
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