Poetry

Who is awake but the nightwatchman?
Or the grim laborer in the graveyard
Shift? The spirit world is in transit—

She cannot hide
her line of footprints in the snow.
The trail leads from her window—

Unmarried, the heart ejaculates
what it must, scarlet-purled, arterial,

away, away. Or conversely, married,
it requires all—venous, freighted with wastes.

We lived in a painting, a pastoral promise of stepped Berkshire hills, 
the Midlands of green meadows in the distance dotted with sheep

I write in time to break 
into timelessness.

we love them too much 
to see them—

No, not insurance. What I
meant to say was “double identity,”

as in Boutros Boutros-Ghali,
William Carlos Williams, Sirhan Sirhan,

my son breathes to leave me
to leave the lean-to
of family: extended and penal