One need not believe that ours are the worst of times to believe they are pretty bad—nonetheless it is a time for poetry.

This morning, I hauled to the streetA heavy wooden pallet, so beatThe workmen had left it behind:Its boards, rough-hewn and splinteringAgainst the asphalt. When I leanedIt on the dumpster, with some twineAnd flattened cardboard boxes, too,For the trash-man, a March gust blewAnd overturned what I had

Jacobnever climbed the ladderburning in his dream. Sleeppressed him like a stonein the dust,and whenhe should have risenlike a flame to jointhat choir, he was sickof traveling,and closedhis eyes to the Seraphimascending, unconsciousof the impossible distancesbetween their steps,missedthem mount the

Stream crossing, train whistle among the beech leaves rustling and a vulture swings down low over the boardwalk when the engine light barrels over the causeway and the geese lift over the dormant buds,a shimmer in the water’s mild ripple, in the liquid where the deer b

After that business with the blackbird, Kevinsore-shouldered from his mortifications—the lent-long arms reach and supplications in service of life’s mysteries and flights—lay himself out, spread-eagled in paschal light,cozy in a copse of alders, cones and catkins, and sle

I station Beckett like Gotama, mid-table, and spread before him the Sunday comics.