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PoemsPoetry is the voice that comes closest to my heart. I have published poems in more than 70 journals. Once all of my submissions left by mail, in yellow envelopes bearing beautiful colored Italian stamps. Now, often the galleys, at least, return on line. Recently a book was published in California--a beautiful handmade volume of poems that I had written when I was a Yaddo as a resident. The book called > Heron Songs> can be purchased from Occasional Press. I never met the woman who chose to publish these poems. After she told me that she has published many poets including John Ashberry and Tom Gunn, she told me that she was more than ninety years old. Poetry moves people and touches them in unexpected ways. My poems have been translated in China. The Heron poems can be pulled off library shelves at Yale, Stanford, and the University of Chicago. Poems find homes and often move by accidents of discovery. Here are two poems published in the Mississippi Review, Volume 19, Number 3, 1991.copyrights belong to the author. White On WhiteThe house was still there behind the trees but the snowpiled up great distances. Not just between breaths momentous, suddenly focused things the way things are-- pitiful, pitiless, getting it straight; reaching a life, those small footsteps, and seeing others, as intent, setting out. It's NowIt's night, that grainy video-tape night, and no moon. There's a train leaving, and all the vague uncertainty of leaving, without knowing, and it's now, not books or stories about cattle cars loaded with innocents. There are no real people clustering there, entering the second carriage on an oblique angle. Not this time. These are shades, Did you ever dream it would be so hard? That raucous And the stalled train there in the yard. Shovellers Put a foot down. And another. It feels like This morning, wasn't it the garden, Or was it there, this inwardness,  Here is a poem published in the Malahat Review in Canada,vol.109, copyright by the author, which I will leave you with. Visit again, and find new work, and plant your own seeds too by working at your craft. BeesInside the bottom drawer white dirty wool, curled like cult secrets, or the intensity of a nest, its sure sense of purpose. In the drawer above, two more Baroque, grey woolen clouds and the pods are there, golden brown cuplets, once touched with honey. An ash-walled city has spread within the limits of the five drawers. Over the years the ripped mattress in the corner of the garage has been taken in. One, two bees groggily drift out. So far and green. From a water-stained crack in the bureau top, The rest is how it appears to me: the show  photo by Roberto Spocchi |
"The Heron Songs" - A limited edition published by Occasional Works Press. E-mail me if you want to know more! Poetry fuses our inner and outer worlds and melts them into a living flame.
 Bees |
