The dead say little in their lettersthey haven’t said before.We find no secrets, and yethow different every sentence soundsheard across the years. My father breaks my heartsimply by being so young and handsome.He’s half my age, with jet-black hair.Look at him in his navy uniformgrinning beside his dive-bomber. Come back, Dad! I want to shout.He says he misses all of us(though I haven’t yet been born).He writes from places I never knew he saw,and everyone he mentions now is dead. There is a large, long photographcurled like a diploma–a banquet sixty years ago.My parents sit uncomfortablyamong tables of dark-suited strangers.The mildewed paper reeks of regret. I wonder what song the…

As I listened from a beach-chair in the shadeTo all the noises that my garden made, It seemed to me only proper that wordsShould be withheld from vegetables and birds. A robin with no Christian name ran throughThe Robin-Anthem which was all it knew, And rustling flowers for some third party waitedTo say which pairs, if any, should get mated. Not one of them was capable of lying, There was not one which knew that it was dyingOr could have with a rhythm or a rhymeAssumed responsibility for time. Let them leave language to their lonely bettersWho count some days and long for certain letters; We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep: Words…

I’ll tell you, if you really want to know:  remember that day you lost two years ago  at the rockpool where you sat and played the jeweler  with all those stones you’d stolen from the shore?  Most of them went dark and nothing more,  but sometimes one would blink the secret color  it had locked up somewhere in its stony sleep.  This is how you knew the ones to keep.   So I collect the dull things of the day  in which I see some possibility  but which are dead and which have the surprise  I don’t know, and I’ve no pool to help me tell– so I look at them…