Enclosure
Morning on the moor:
the town is in possession
of no place, enclosed it
and could not stay
the night.
Poemas sobre el tema: town
Poemas sobre el tema «town» en Poets.by.
Water men
All in town go by water
and talk with the water, desire
to be water: a dress of ten thousand hands.
The water received the water
and they made a great deal of joy to see one another.
I left off my great skirt
and went to sell a horse
for a dish of herrings.
Three Miles, Uphill in Both Directions
the sun was a letter
of the alphabet then
my stomach could pronounce it
better than my mouth
on the walk to school through
two centuries of wreckage
past a ghost village
and the end of town eaten
by the interstate
along train tracks we knew
to get off of when
they started to hum
up over the wooded hill
in the center of town
with its water tank and cemetery
past hidden rooms
Descent
katydids
in and out of sync
our ragged breaths
In dreams, my hometown in central Pennsylvania has partially merged with London. There are multiple high-rise apartment buildings now, rather than just one, the river is wider, the paper mill has become a sprawling industrial complex, and the poor section of town now has a distinctly bohemian flavor. Wandering the wooded hill in the center of town, I find a nearly deserted, glassed-in staircase, and descend it in great leaps, nearly flying. My British wife, undercover as a Bond girl, asks how I can do that and not get hurt. This is all just a dream, I tell her. Is it real for you?
katydids
together apart
together
Gone
Blinded and stumbling,
Grabbing anything,
Dragging everything,
Onto the ground.
Laughter echoing,
Voices whispering,
Drowning out everything,
In this small town.
Broken and shattered,
Mind doing cartwheels,
A hand to hold onto,
Is nowhere to be found.
A sweet embrace,
My last mistake,
A comforting smile,
A deathly grip.
View of Grand Coulee from the Hospital
trees and lines and stickmen
and boulders too big to be less than
a hill heavy rock a motel {sigh}
a main street see the middle
school from here and a parts store nearly
the library and a grocery store below
in the midway
and a park with boulders taller
than 5 men where quail live
and deer play but no dogs are
allowed and they have swings
and a merry-go-round and it’s
almost summer the thrift
store will have summer clothes this
week and this is where the turkeys
go and they have teeter-totters
envy
hate me,
love me,
do what you want with me,
it is not the town itself,
but the people from whom i want to flee
i'm so deeply apologetic that my own feelings made you feel threatened
she puts her hand on my shoulder
and my heart flutters
it is when i'm reminded that other people think i deserve to die
do i look at her and let out a sigh
she is more beautiful than the sun
and in my heart she could easily win number one
but it is other people's beliefs
that make our fleeting moments brief
people will judge me
they will hate me
* * *
Here I have come
to where?
A bar in the middle of nowhere, New York City
But it's Spanish and that's good.
And why?
Because it makes me feel
separated from obligations
and alone
in a lost town
on the west coast of vanquished Mexico.
The automatic easy emptyness
of the solved day
is gone there.
Gone with the hard binds of responsibility
A womans alcoholic joy
is used there.
Today's Date
Pick up on grand torque-suitably an
abstract reference. Can-needs must-be
inclusive. Those latent charms, so hard to
get across. Easy-filling the day with
detachable items. Day begins in haze as
trucks begin to move. All around the edges
of the town. The monuments encased in fog.
A line of bicyclists streaming past the
deserted sports palace, the marsh slipping
back in over the faltering road. The contributions
of day-laborers towards colonial
bamboo tower. Each succeeding generation of
monumentality bears its own distinct relation
to air plane, street lights, noise in wind.
The generations crowd each other out, until
no sequence-nothing wiggles in the void.
North San Juan
There’s no South or West or
East San Juan, only
North San Juan, alone with its
name, cut in half
by a highway. Once miners
loved it, then Hippies, now
no one special. It’s a place
boozers who like to stop
at every place stop. Its
graveyard is enormous,
with regal vestiges—tall
tombstones, wealthy oaks. In
summer-swelter, flies stick
to diesel oil. Sloppy
screened-doors flop
in breezes. Sadness
Train Window
Small towns
Crawling out of their green shirts...
Tubercular towns
Coughing a little in the dawn...
And the church...
There is always a church
With its natty spire
And the vestibule--
That's where they whisper:
Tzz-tzz... tzz-tzz... tzz-tzz...
How many codes for a wireless whisper--
And corn flatter than it should be
And those chits of leaves
Gadding with every wind?
Small towns
From Connecticut to Maine:
The Ghost of Deacon Brown
In a backwoods town
Lived Deacon Brown,
And he was a miser old;
He would trust no bank,
So he dug, and sank
In the ground a box of gold,
Down deep in the ground a box of gold.
He hid his gold,
As has been told,
He remembered that he did it;
But sad to say,
On the very next day,
He forgot just where he hid it:
To find his gold he tried and tried
Till he grew faint and sick, and died.
Then on each dark and gloomy night