After fifty years of writing, my archive of poems numbers in the hundreds and continues to expand. I recently published Paper Black Leaf with John Aylen Books, a selection of poems from my first three decades of writing.  I anticipate publishing a second collection of shorter poems in 2027 and a collection of poetic sequences a year later.

Some poems for Masters

Master

Now he is an old man mumbling in his garden.
His purple-knotted knuckles move among the leaves;
As he works he sings snatches of old poems,
The same again and again, as a child plays.

Priestly hands, whose husbandry is blessing
By plucking arid leaves from the sweet stems;
There is no cultivation so difficult, so he says,
As this same generation in the lives of men.

from Faith

in the afternoon
the broad cluttered window-sill
is golden, the papers
stirring in the open wind

the man is not old
he wheels his chair
suddenly to my side
of our audience
Eliot in hand
and reads his insistence
into the fraudulent lines

I am moved
I fight myself on it
fix on the taint of his breath
the crooked finger
tracing the lines
I remember the moisture
of those moving eyes

and gone too far
for irony now
I cared for the modern poem

To Woolf

Too long these waves
Have sufficed as metaphor;
Though I too accept
Eternity in things,
The sameness of their changing,

We are not gods, to live
As the waves would have us,
Not here to submit
To such beautiful erosion,
Not of one wave, not of infinite.

We live in small ways.
Enough if a life
Swells from the depth
Or crests before shore.
To seek more,

To drift in the shallows
As wave upon wave
Lifts you and lowers you,
As truth after truth
Slips you aside,

Is to take these waves
For intention; philosophy;
Forgetting they scarcely
Rippled that ocean
You drowned in; in time.

The House in Hampstead

Dear Keats, the journey home was uneventful;
After we parted in the garden, I arrived
In Ealing on the tube; the air was dreadful:
You will well remember the heat of that afternoon.

The flight itself took less than seven hours.
I passed the time with sleep and magazines;
No poetry—was still too slumped with yours;
Arrived at dusk in Canada, and so home.

The sunlight on your pallor, I remember;
The blanket on your chest and shoulders thrown
By Fanny; and your queer smile as I parted,
And said you would be better after Rome.

What will I do when you are not in England
To answer these?  What beauty should I prize
Enough to write of, if you have not lent it
Precedence of your eyes?

Give me your living hand, and in your blood
Remember me.  No nightingales here,
And I could not have written such an ode;
Or had I, would have no one who could hear.

from Socratic Monologues

I

The most terrifying of all the gods
is character.  There is no Fate

here; your ghost is your essential nature
and all its postures now are fled

with the body that housed them.  Here
you will face eternity with your true soul,

and it is not gazing forward into stars.
The infinity of Hell is retrospect,

each peevish gesture relived without
the complacency flesh always granted me—

seeing myself now as a character
I chose.  There are no minor decisions.

The great are always those who feel
unutterable power over their own beings;

that folly’s name is genius.  What we endure
in life is the precise fruition

of our real wills, the selves we cannot know
till death, the bystander, makes our business plain
 

The Vicious Master

He has left me sitting among his books, has given music
to my ear, has left off at last with the nightly grasp on my collar.

It seems I may roam now in this comfortable home
from room to room, in darkness or in light, the glass of wine

glinting in my hand as I blow out my own lanterns.
He has gone for good, I say, and shake my shoulders and hair

free where the yoke I welcomed and imagined
rested against my neck and bowed my head against pride.

I lift and gaze at pictures; I bathe long hours—
the garden is mine to enjoy.  I sleep into the summer

morning.  All things around me exhale my great ease.
Where has my master left me but in the home I have always known?

Only the sudden lifting of duty, the head unbowed,
the hands lying quiet in my lap, their calluses softening,

speak of this wondrous change.  Myself, I am resting
as long as I’ve left to live, no bows to make, with no one calling.