“I was left with myself and had to do the one thing I could to survive. I knew it would be difficult to write, very difficult, but I set about doing it.”

Surely it’s ridiculous maybe even scandalous
that I feel such overpowering envy
for the eleven-year-old son who’s dozing

 I tried, and each attempt was a fiasco. 
I yearned, but every love of mine was wrong. 
I needed, and the shame was overwhelming. 

When cloud cover com- 
plicates the crossing 
all we can do is look 

He was middle-aged which 
means that the mixture of 
death and life in him was 

the train has left the 
station you can’t take it. 
Once the promise has been 

This world so 
golden so un- 
reachable this 

If a man is his desire 
if a man is his desire 
if a man is his desire 

When as a child
I came to be schooled by the Muses,
one of them took me by the hand,

I take the dusty yearbook off the shelf
and scan the fledgling, mostly white, male faces:
a foreign country, but the aging self

If we could see the lake someday without
the heaviness the clouds are always casting
in pewter ridges, would there be a doubt

Lateness is all that shimmers in the leaves,
that trembles in the bending grass,
that glistens on the berries on the vine.

It isn’t worth our while to fret about
our excellence or impotence in art.
I would have liked to be wilder, bolder,

Probably
evening is falling. Not because of the years,
which are numerous, but because the play

When, out of the blue. Saint Martin shakes
his embers down, stirring the fire in the bottom pit
of Ontario’s black furnace—

Your “yet-to-be-dismantled” elms are few,
and by the time you read this may be gone.
In my own childhood we had one or two