ALONE ON CHRISTMAS EVE IN JAPAN Not wanting to lose it all for poetry. Wanting to live the living. All this year looking on the graveyard below my apartment. Holding […]

American Poet Jack Gilbert (1925-2012) The Cucumbers of Praxilla of Sicyon What is the best we leave behind? Certainly love and form and ourselves. Surely those. But it is the […]

Each Thing Measured by the Same Sun Nothing to tell. Nothing to desire. A silence that is not unhappy. Who will guess I am not backing away? I am pleased […]

Poetry Reading I’m curled into a ball like a dog that is cold. Who will tell me why I was born, why this monstrosity called life. The telephone rings. I […]

  COURAGE And now you know that it won’t turn out as it should that what you did was not enough, that ignorance, old evil, is enforced and willed, and […]

The Abnormal Is Not Courage The Poles rode out from Warsaw against the German tanks on horses. Rode knowing, in sunlight, with sabers. A magnitude of beauty that allows me […]

World of Made and Unmade from Section III * * * How will you spend your courage, her life asks my life No courage spent of bloodshot/gunshot/taproot/eye. How will you […]

The Cucumbers of Praxilla of Sicyon What is the best we leave behind? Certainly love and form and ourselves. Surely those. But it is the mornings that are hard to […]

  TODAY I WAS HAPPY, SO I MADE THIS POEM As the plump squirrel scampers Across the roof of the corncrib, The moon suddenly stands up in the darkness, And […]

Oh, I Said My subject is the soul Difficult to talk about, Since it is invisible, Silent and often absent. Even when it shows itself In the eyes of a […]