Where He Lives


All night the poet's friends,
the coyotes, are singing.
They are beyond the edge

of light in the licking
darkness, telling stories
of need and loneliness.

They are out beyond hope.
The poet does not know
what to promise them, for

he lives outside hope
himself: a day is a day
is a day, nothing more.

When the sun sets, the wind
drops, the stars come out,
darkness takes what it wants.

Each dawn he must start fresh.
He must do what we do,
nothing more, nothing less.





What He Has Lost


Wind in the poet's shed
stirring the darkness.
The poet sits listening
and has little to say.

Words are only echoes
of what has been lost.
He does not want them
now that they are gone.

The light has faded.
The music he made
is only memory,
the dry taste of dying.

The poet sits listening.
It is all he can do.





What It Comes To


An old man moving slow.
He is what he is, an

old poet wandering
away from home again.

Yes, I am that old man,
looking for a word, for

the right word, an image,
a sentence, some hard thing

that will tell what it is
I have spent my life on,

what it comes to, or doesn't,
as it all falls away from me.




He Kept To Himself
  —After two lines by Charles Wright

That's what they'll say about me,
too, if they say anything at all --
He kept to himself and didn't play
well with others. He lived his life
in a sheep shed, they'll say, and it
will be true enough. I'm a hermit
by need and inclination. I'm
a quarrelsome fellow because
the world wants to quarrel, dammit.
It's not getting any sweeter.
You push me off when I venture
outside this dark enclosure; you
ignore me when I stay put. Trolls
live under the bridge by choice.
He wrote what he pleased. He waited
for no one's blessing. He kept to
himself. It was nearly enough.





Turning Sixty-Seven


The poet
would speak if he could,
at his age,

but silence
is more attractive
to him now.

The applause
never was. The poet
accepts that

he has failed.
This is how it is.
So be it.

Lie down now
upon the darkness.
Rest in peace.