Stanley Kunitz

After The Last Dynasty

Reading in Li Po How “the peach blossom follows the water” I keep thinking of you Because you were so much like Chairman Mao, Naturally with the sex Transposed And the figure slighter. Loving

Father and Son

Now in the suburbs and the falling light I followed him, and now down sandy road Whitter than bone-dust, through the sweet Curdle of fields, where the plums Dropped with their load of ripeness,

The Science Of The Night

I touch you in the night, whose gift was you, My careless sprawler, And I touch you cold, unstirring, star-bemused, That have become the land of your self-strangeness. What long seduction of the bone

The Snakes of September

All summer I heard them Rustling in the shrubbery, Outracing me from tier To tier in my garden, A whisper among the viburnums, A signal flashed from the hedgerow, A shadow pulsing In the

Single Vision

Before I am completely shriven I shall reject my inch of heaven. Cancel my eyes, and, standing, sink Into my deepest self; there drink Memory down. The banner of My blood, unfurled, will not

Hornworm: Autumn Lamentation

Since that first morning when I crawled Into the world, a naked grubby thing, And found the world unkind, My dearest faith has been that this Is but a trial: I shall be changed.

King of the River

If the water were clear enough, If the water were still, But the water is not clear, The water is not still, You would see yourself, Slipped out of your skin, Nosing upstream, Slapping,

The Layers

I have walked through many lives, Some of them my own, And I am not who I was, Though some principle of being Abides, from which I struggle Not to stray. When I look

The Abduction

Some things I do not profess To understand, perhaps Not wanting to, including Whatever it was they did With you or you with them That timeless summer day When you stumbled out of the

First Love

At his incipient sun The ice of twenty winters broke, Crackling, in her eyes. Her mirroring, still mind, That held the world (made double) calm, Went fluid, and it ran. There was a stir

The Testing-Tree

1 On my way home from school Up tribal Providence Hill Past the Academy ballpark Where I could never hope to play I scuffed in the drainage ditch Among the sodden seethe of leaves

Passing Through

Nobody in the widow’s household Ever celebrated anniversaries. In the secrecy of my room I would not admit I cared That my friends were given parties. Before I left town for school My birthday

End of Summer

An agitation of the air, A perturbation of the light Admonished me the unloved year Would turn on its hinge that night. I stood in the disenchanted field Amid the stubble and the stones

Master And Mistress

As if I were composed of dust and air, The shape confronting me upon the stair (Athlete of shadow, lighted by a stain On its disjunctive breast I saw it plain ) Moved through

The Portrait

My mother never forgave my father For killing himself, Especially at such an awkward time And in a public park, That spring When I was waiting to be born. She locked his name In

Halley's Comet

Miss Murphy in first grade Wrote its name in chalk Across the board and told us It was roaring down the stormtracks Of the Milky Way at frightful speed And if it wandered off

Light splashed this morning On the shell-pink anemones Swaying on their tall stems; Down blue-spiked veronica Light flowed in rivulets Over the humps of the honeybees; This morning I saw light kiss The silk

The Long Boat

When his boat snapped loose From its mooring, under The screaking of the gulls, He tried at first to wave To his dear ones on shore, But in the rolling fog They had already

An Old Cracked Tune

My name is Solomon Levi, The desert is my home, My mother’s breast was thorny, And father I had none. The sands whispered, Be separate, The stones taught me, Be hard. I dance, for

The Dark and the Fair

A roaring company that festive night; The beast of dialectic dragged his chains, Prowling from chair to chair is the smoking light, While the snow hissed against the windowpanes. Our politics, our science, and

The Quarrel

The word I spoke in anger Weighs less than a parsley seed, But a road runs through it That leads to my grave, That bought-and-paid-for lot On a salt-sprayed hill in Truro Where the