Poetry

We lived in a painting, a pastoral promise of stepped Berkshire hills, 
the Midlands of green meadows in the distance dotted with sheep

I write in time to break 
into timelessness.

we love them too much 
to see them—

No, not insurance. What I
meant to say was “double identity,”

as in Boutros Boutros-Ghali,
William Carlos Williams, Sirhan Sirhan,

my son breathes to leave me
to leave the lean-to
of family: extended and penal 

She kept putting off sending him the book,
then one afternoon she recognized 
the author walking up Fifth Avenue

One night, she turns the novel’s last page. This is all—
small house, plain street, some trees, sweet and irksome neighbors, dishes, bills, water leaks, 

He walks back from the
                                         window in half-shadow

a half-shade himself

The day moon the
                                     spirit of the morning

The girl seems to fly
the hawk above her, a kite of feathers