Old snow
Melting snow reveals old secrets.
Two spots of blood
have reemerged in the yard.
Wrinkles appear—
long, dark faultlines
from differential settling.
I know you,
I mutter to myself.
We’ve been here before.
Poems on the topic: yard
Poems on the topic “yard” on Poets.by.
Longlands
I hear
the gander didn't hiss at me.
Was it me? no
it was the gander.
It was me. yes
we have recognized each other
He expects me to carry food. I
expect him to carry food.
Neither is satisfied and I think
I am smarter than he is.
I see
he has more fucking than I have.
Of course
I am not as proud
but I say my walk is more elegant.
I know
The Collector
If you’re his wife, you’ve quit
asking why it all piles up out there
in the yard for everyone to see
from the highway. Hubcaps from ghostly coupes.
Beer signs in neon cursive. Coke machines,
cars, cars, cars. You keep the house
and the backyard according to your principles.
You hate the mechanism in men
that drives them to love machinery.
If you're his dog, you
urinate on tires encircling weeds.
You sniff varieties of rust,
chase squirrels until they disappear,
until you ram your hot wet nose
into angle iron; it all
makes the yard difficult.
Garbage-Heap
The wind was shrill and mercenary,
Like a housewife pacing down the sky.
Green weeds and tin-cans in the yard
Made a debris of ludicrous dissipations.
The ochre of cold elations
Had settled on the cans.
Their brilliant labels peeped from the weeds,
Like the remains of a charlatan.
A bone reclined against a fence-post
And mouldily congratulated life.
A woman's garter wasted its faded frills
Upon a newspaper argument.
The shipwrecked rancor of bottles and boxes
Was pressed to disfigured complexities.
A smell of torrential asperity
Knew the spirit of the yard.
Life
A rind of light hangs low
On the rim of the world;
A sound of feet disturbs
The quiet of the cell
Where a rope and a beam looms high
At the end of the yard.
But in the dusk
Of that walled yard waits a woman;
And as the thing from its cell,
Still guarded and chained and bound,
Crosses that little space,
Silent, for ten brief steps,
A woman hangs on his neck.
And that walk from a cell to a sleep
Is known as Life,
And those ten dark steps
Describe a feeling — we’ll find a poem
Or try: