Howard Nemerov

I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee

I tell you that I see her still At the dark entrance of the hall. One gas lamp burning near her shoulder Shone also from her other side Where hung the long inaccurate glass

September, The First Day Of School

I My child and I hold hands on the way to school, And when I leave him at the first-grade door He cries a little but is brave; he does Let go. My selfish

The Goose Fish

On the long shore, lit by the moon To show them properly alone, Two lovers suddenly embraced So that their shadows were as one. The ordinary night was graced For them by the swift

Because You Asked About The Line Between Prose And Poetry

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle That while you watched turned into pieces of snow Riding a gradient invisible From silver aslant to random, white, and slow. There came a moment that you

The Beautiful Lawn Sprinkler

What gives it power makes it change its mind At each extreme, and lean its rising rain Down low, first one and then the other way; In which exchange humility and pride Reverse, forgive,

Insomnia I

Some nights it’s bound to be your best way out, When nightmare is the short end of the stick, When sleep is a part of town where it’s not safe To walk at night,

Ozymandias II

I met a guy I used to know, who said: “You take your ’57 Karnak, now, The model that they called their Coop de Veal That had the pointy rubber boobs for bumpers You

Poetics

You know the old story Ann Landers tells About the houseife in her basement doing the wash? She’s wearing her nightie, and she thinks, “Well, hell, I might’s well put this in as well,”

The Dependencies

This morning, between two branches of a tree Beside the door, epeira once again Has spun and signed his tapestry and trap. I test his early-warning system and It works, he scrambles forth in

Storm Windows

People are putting up storm windows now, Or were, this morning, until the heavy rain Drove them indoors. So, coming home at noon, I saw storm windows lying on the ground, Frame-full of rain;

The Lobster

Here at the Super Duper, in a glass tank Supplied by a rill of cold fresh water Running down a glass washboard at one end And siphoned off at the other, and so Perpetually

A Spell before Winter

After the red leaf and the gold have gone, Brought down by the wind, then by hammering rain Bruised and discolored, when October’s flame Goes blue to guttering in the cusp, this land Sinks

Across the millstream below the bridge Seven blue swallows divide the air In shapes invisible and evanescent, Kaleidoscopic beyond the mind’s Or memory’s power to keep them there. “History is where tensions were,” “Form

Amateurs of Heaven

Two lovers to a midnight meadow came High in the hills, to lie there hand and hand Like effigies and look up at the stars, The never-setting ones set in the North To circle

Casting

The waters deep, the waters dark, Reflect the seekers, hide the sought, Whether in water or in air to drown. Between them curls the silver spark, Barbed, baited, waiting, of a thought Which in

Style

Flaubert wanted to write a novel About nothing. It was to have no subject And be sustained upon the style alone, Like the Holy Ghost cruising above The abyss, or like the little animals

Fugue

You see them vanish in their speeding cars, The many people hastening through the world, And wonder what they would have done before This time of time speed distance, random streams Of molecules hastened

Threshold

When in still air and still in summertime A leaf has had enough of this, it seems To make up its mind to go; fine as a sage Its drifting in detachment down the

Lion & Honeycomb

He didn’t want to do it with skill, He’d had enough of skill. If he never saw Another villanelle, it would be too soon; And the same went for sonnets. If it had been

Learning by Doing

They’re taking down a tree at the front door, The power saw is snarling at some nerves, Whining at others. Now and then it grunts, And sawdust falls like snow or a drift of

Gyroscope

This admirable gadget, when it is Wound on a string and spun with steady force, Maintains its balance on most any smooth Surface, pleasantly humming as it goes. It is whirled not on a

Kicks

The fishermen on Lake Michigan, sometimes, For kicks, they spit two hunks of bait on hooks At either end of a single length of line And toss that up among the scavenging gulls, Who

Walking the Dog

Two universes mosey down the street Connected by love and a leash and nothing else. Mostly I look at lamplight through the leaves While he mooches along with tail up and snout down, Getting

The Makers

Who can remember back to the first poets, The greatest ones, greater even than Orpheus? No one has remembered that far back Or now considers, among the artifacts, And bones and cantilevered inference The

Learning the Trees

Before you can learn the trees, you have to learn The language of the trees. That’s done indoors, Out of a book, which now you think of it Is one of the transformations of