(from Halfway, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1961)

Isosceles of knees
my boys and girls sit
cross-legged in blue July
and finger the peel
of their sun-killed skin
or pick at the splintery boards
of the dock. The old lake
smiles to a fish
and quiets back to glass.

Class, I say, this is
the front head release.
And Adam’s boy, whose ribs
dance to be numbered aloud,
I choose to strangle me.
Jaw down in his embrace
I tell the breakaway.
Now swimming in the air
we drown, wrenching the chin,
clawing the arm around.

The magic seeps away.
My heroes frown to see
a menace in the element
they lately loved.
Class, I say (and want
to say, children, my dears,
I too know how to be afraid),
I tell you what I know:
go down to save.

Now two by two they leave
the dock to play at death
by suffocation.
The old lake smiles,
turned sudden to a foe,
taking my children down,
half held by half
ordaining they let go.

(from Still to Mow, W.W. Norton, 2007)

Whatever happened to the cross-chest carry,
the head carry, the hair carry,

the tired-swimmer- put-your- hands-on- my-shoulders-
and-look- in-my- eyes retrieval, and what

became of the stride jump when you leap
from impossible heights and land with your head

above water so that you never lose sight
of your drowning person, or if he is close enough, where

is the life saver ring attached to a rope
you can hurl at your quarry, then haul

him to safety, or as a last resort
where is the dock into which you tug

the unconscious soul, place him facedown,
clear his mouth, straddle his legs and press

with your hands on both sides of his rib cage
to the rhythm of out goes the bad air in

comes the good and pray he will breathe,
hallowed methods we practice over and over

the summer I turned eighteen to win
my Water Safety Instructor’s badge

and where is the boy from Ephrata, PA
I made out with night after night in the lee

of a rotting boathouse at a small dank camp
on the lower Chesapeake Bay?

(from Where I Live – New & Selected Poems 1990-2010, W.W. Norton, 2010)

Into my empty head there come
a cotton beach, a dock wherefrom

I set out, oily and nude
through mist, in chilly solitude.

There was no line, no roof or floor
to tell the water from the air.

Night fog thick as terry cloth
closed me in its fuzzy growth.

I hung my bathrobe on two pegs.
I took the lake between my legs.

Invaded and invader, I
went overhand on that flat sky.

Fish twitched beneath me, quick and tame.
In their green zone they sang my name

and in the rhythm of the swim
I hummed a two-four- time slow hymn.

I hummed "Abide With Me." The beat
rose in the fine thrash of my feet,

rose in the bubbles I put out
slantwise, trailing through my mouth.

My bones drank water; water fell
through all my doors. I was the well

that fed the lake that met my sea
in which I sang "Abide With Me."

(from Jack, W.W. Norton, 2005)

It isn’t gunfire
that wakes me
but the rat-a- tat-tat
of hickory nuts raining
on the tin roof
of the trailer barn.
Then the barred owl
in the blackness, calling
for company, who
who cooks for you-u- u?
and suddenly
it’s morning.

In the bathroom
the tiny phallic
night light
still flickers.
Black spots
of gnats, moths
folded in slumber
with one swipe
of the washcloth
reduce to powder.
An earwig to flush.
Two mosquitoes
lurking in the shower.
Killing before
breakfast

and killing after:
Japanese beetles
all green and coppery
fornicating on
the leafy tops
of the raspberries
piggybacked
triplets and foursomes
easy to flick
into soap suds.
Their glistening
Drowning selves
a carpet of beads unstrung
spit Bad Buddhist!

At the pond
naked, pale
I slip between
two shores
of greenery
solitary
back in the murk
of womb while
there goes mr. big
the brookie
trailed by mrs. big
wispy silhouettes
darting in synchrony
past the deep pool
by the great rock

the great rock
that is always dark
on its underside
the one I used to dive
from, aiming to come up
in the heart
of a cold spring
rising exultant
time after time
into the fizz
of lime-green light. . . .

At sundown the horses’
winter hay arrives.
The dogs raise
an appropriate racket.
Always the annual
hay supply comes
at suppertime
on the hottest day
of August.

Eddy and Tim, oily
with sweat, grunt
bucking hay
heaving
40-lb. bales up
crisscrossed like
Pick-Up Sticks
so air can circulate.

They stand around after holding their elbows
that noncommittal
Yankee gesture
that says friendship
same as last year.
We chat, exchange
town gossip
the usual, except
Eddie’s son
is in Iraq.

Afterward
the sweep-up.
Hay clings to everything
like rumor.
The full barn
cries summer, a scent
I suck into myself.
Big red sundown
induces melancholy.

I want to sing
of death unbruised.
Its smoothening.
I want to prepare
for death’s arrival
in my life.
I want to be an advanced thinker—
the will, the organ donation,
the power of attorney—
but when my old
dead horses come
running toward me
in a dream
healthy and halterless
—Gennie, Taboo, and Jack—
I take it back.

If only death could be
like going to the movies.
You get up afterward
and go out
saying, how was it?
Tell me, tell me how was it.