Poetry

This morning, I hauled to the streetA heavy wooden pallet, so beatThe workmen had left it behind:Its boards, rough-hewn and splinteringAgainst the asphalt. When I leanedIt on the dumpster, with some twineAnd flattened cardboard boxes, too,For the trash-man, a March gust blewAnd overturned what I had

Stream crossing, train whistle among the beech leaves rustling and a vulture swings down low over the boardwalk when the engine light barrels over the causeway and the geese lift over the dormant buds,a shimmer in the water’s mild ripple, in the liquid where the deer b

After that business with the blackbird, Kevinsore-shouldered from his mortifications—the lent-long arms reach and supplications in service of life’s mysteries and flights—lay himself out, spread-eagled in paschal light,cozy in a copse of alders, cones and catkins, and sle

It is still Easter, though we are agroundthis monster’s back, tethered to its tail. This is still an island, as it rises in swells,falls in troughs, follows wanton tides. Still a mooring, a port enoughfor our feast. Our Lord is still risen. Still our hearts that burn and yielda

We kiss the person we love last thing beforethe coffin is shut       —Jack Gilbert You lean across the coffin’s gunwale to kissyour father before the rower launches into that long, last voyage to purgatory, while we, survivors, walk and drive onto stree

IHow to feel his death? On the street.The shots. My friend’s scream. One cracked the air, the other pierced the thin veil, a usual evening returning from somewhere,returned from many times before. When I look for where to fix the broken city that I love, the whole towe