He didn’t fight.
He hadn’t fought at all.

Battered and venerable and homely.

infested with tiny white sea-lice

I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers

grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,

everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

Oh, but it is dirty!

oil-soaked, oil-permeated

Do they live in the station?

Some comic books provide the only note of colour

Why, oh why, the doily?

Somebody loves us all.

The brown enormous odor he lived by was too close … for him to judge.

even to the sow that always ate her young -
till, sickeneing, he leaned to scratch her head

(He hid the pints behind a two-by-four)

safe and companionable as in the Ark.

His shuddering insights, beyond his control

But it took him a long time
finally to make his mind up to go home.

September rain falls on the house.

laughing and talking to hide her tears.

She thinks that her equinoctial tears …
were both foretold by the alamanc

the teakettle’s small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove

Bird-like, the almanac hovers half open above the child

Then the child puts in a man with buttons like tears

my mother laid out Arthur
beneath the chromographs

Below them on the table
stood a stuffed loon

He kept his own counsel
on his white, frozen lake

His eyes were red glass

Arthur’s coffin was
a little frosted cake

He was all white, like a doll
that hadn’t been painted yet

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?

Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?

But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road

Yes, a pity not to have pondered,
… on what connection can exist for centuries

‘Is it lack of imaination that makes us come to imagined places, not just stay at home?’