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