Activity

the crows were calling around me to white air
I could hear their wings dripping and hear small birds with
  lights
 breaking in their tongues the cold soaked through me I
  was able
after that morning to believe stories that once
 would have been closed to me I saw a carriag…

Did I think it would abide as it was forever
 all that time ago the turned earth in the old garden
where I stood in spring remembering spring in another place
 that had ceased to exist and the dug roots kept giving up
their black tokens their coins and bone buttons and shoe nails
 mad…

I OFTEN SAY TO MY STUDENTS—AND IT IS STILL SO FUNNY AND strange to me to think that I am no longer a student but am a teacher myself, because in my mind, especially in relation to poetry, I will always be one—that without clarity, it is not possible to have true mystery. By clarity, I mean a sense …

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and…

I am trying to pry open your casket
with this burning snowflake.

I’ll give up my sleep for you.
This freezing sleet keeps coming down
and I can barely see.

If this trick works we can rub our hands
together, maybe

start a little fire
with our identification papers.
I don’t know but I …