Poetry

That landscape—unpeopled, unburiable, sun-stunned—
Lifts me re-orphaned out of language
Into the nomenclature of stones,
unangeled, unsought-for.

We lay out our own dark end,
guilt, and the happiness of guilt.

Seventy years, and what’s left?
Or better still, what’s gone before?
A couple of lines, a day or two out in the cold?
And all those books, those half-baked books,
sweet yeast for the yellow dust?

We’ve got to examine truth. To me, writing, from the very beginning and right until this day, is a voyage of discovery. Of the mystery of life. I am one of those people who have no religious faith, I am an atheist. I believe there is only...

She writes: the air here changes
like a face in a mirror.
In the flight of moths at dusk
we see unknown primary colors.

The land was for bunchgrass, for cattle
grazing against the wind—not color, not
contented gazing. She dragged hoses,