The Public Garden (audio only)
Click the icon above to listen to this audio poem.
Poems
Find and share the perfect poems.
More by this poet
Waking in the Blue
The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore, rouses from the mare's-nest of his drowsy head propped on The Meaning of Meaning. He catwalks down our corridor. Azure day makes my agonized blue window bleaker. Crows maunder on the petrified fairway. Absence!
1976
Home After Three Months Away
Gone now the baby's nurse, a lioness who ruled the roost and made the Mother cry. She used to tie gobbets of porkrind in bowknots of gauze-- three months they hung like soggy toast on our eight foot magnolia tree, and helped the English sparrows weather a Boston winter. Three months, three months! Is Richard now himself again? Dimpled with exaltation, my daughter holds her levee in the tub. Our noses rub, each of us pats a stringy lock of hair-- they tell me nothing's gone. Though I am forty-one, not forty now, the time I put away was child's play.
1976
Dolphin
My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise, a captive as Racine, the man of craft, drawn through his maze of iron composition by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre. When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body caught in its hangman's-knot of sinking lines, the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. . . . I have sat and listened to too many words of the collaborating muse, and plotted perhaps too freely with my life, not avoiding injury to others, not avoiding injury to myself— to ask compassion . . .
1976