His awful skin 
stretched out by some tradesman 
is like my skin, here between my fingers, 
a kind of webbing, a kind of frog. 
Surely when first born my face was this tiny 
and before I was born surely I could fly. 
Not well, mind you, only a veil... (Read full poem)

Eyes the color of winter water,
eyes the winter of water where I

Quoits in the Spartan month
Hyacinthius, the game
joins us, pronounces

us god and boy: I toss him
the discus thinking This is mine
and the wind says Not yet

Memory with small... (Read full poem)

To say that she came into me,
from another world, is not true.
Nothing comes into the universe
and nothing leaves it.
My mother—I mean my daughter did not
enter me. She began to exist
inside me—she appeared within me.
And my mother did not... (Read full poem)

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the joy 
at the bend in the road where we turned toward 
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands, 
from sweet fellowship in the bins, 
comes nectar at the... (Read full poem)

Mayday: two came to field in such wise :
`A daisied mead', each said to each,
So were they one; so sought they couch,
Across barbed stile, through flocked brown cows.

`No pitchforked farmer, please,' she said;
`May cockcrow guard us safe,' said... (Read full poem)

1.

You lay in the nest of your real death,
Beyond the print of my nervous fingers
Where they touched your moving head;
Your old skin puckering, your lungs' breath
Grown baby short as you looked up last
At my face swinging over the human bed,
And... (Read full poem)

Your skin like dawn
Mine like musk

One paints the beginning
of a certain end.

The other, the end of a
sure beginning. (Read full poem)

Almost yesterday, those gentle ladies stole
to their baths in Atlantic Cuty, for the lost
rites of the first sea of the first salt
running from a faucet. I have heard they sat
for hours in briny tubs, patting hotel towels
sweetly over shivered skin,... (Read full poem)

To you    whom I've hurt
not meaning to

I offer this plum    this drupe
no shell but a thin skin purpled

I tender to your mouth    the muscle
the sweet sympathetic scar-tissue

surrounding the stone    the seed
which wants to be buried(Read full poem)

Because the shad
are swimming
in our waters now,

breaching the skin
of the river with their
tarnished silvery fins,

heading upstream
straight for our tables
where already

knives and forks gleam
in anticipation, these trees
in the woods... (Read full poem)

Some women marry houses.
It's another kind of skin; it has a heart, 
a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.
The walls are permanent and pink.
See how she sits on her knees all day, 
faithfully washing herself down.
Men enter by force, drawn back like... (Read full poem)

As cool as the pale wet leaves 
of lily-of-the-valley 
She lay beside me in the dawn.(Read full poem)

The white fog creeps from the cold sea over the city,
Over the pale grey tumbled towers,—
And settles among the roofs, the pale grey walls.
Along damp sinuous streets it crawls,
Curls like a dream among the motionless trees
And seems to... (Read full poem)