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—

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

She kept putting off sending him the book,
then one afternoon she recognized 
the author walking up Fifth Avenue

One night, she turns the novel’s last page. This is all—
small house, plain street, some trees, sweet and irksome neighbors, dishes, bills, water leaks, 

Nervous, twigs split, become swallows, 
jeté the platinum poring chits

over horizon’s bistered tinge.
Is a murderer secreted in us all,

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