- 1. Poem About People
The jaunty crop-haired graying
Women in grocery stores,
Their clothes boyish and neat,
New mittens or clean sneakers,
...
- 2. Shirt
The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians
...
- 3. At Pleasure Bay
In the willows along the river at Pleasure Bay
A catbird singing, never the same phrase twice.
Here under the pines a little off the road
In 1927 the Chief of Police
...
- 4. The Green Piano
Aeolian. Gratis. Great thunderer, half-ton infant of miracles
Torn free of charge from the universe by my mother's will.
You must have amazed that half-respectable street
...
- 5. Poem With Refrains
The opening scene. The yellow, coal-fed fog
Uncurling over the tainted city river,
A young girl rowing and her anxious father
Scavenging for corpses. Funeral meats. The clever
...
- 6. Impossible To Tell
to Robert Hass and in memory of Elliot Gilbert
Slow dulcimer, gavotte and bow, in autumn,
...
- 7. The Refinery
". . . our language, forged in the dark bycenturies of violent
pressure, underground,out of the stuff of dead life."
Thirsty and languorous after their long black sleep
...
- 8. The Night Game
Some of us believe
We would have conceived romantic
Love out of our own passions
With no precedents,
...
