“Had any children? the doctor asks. I say No. And close my lips—the other half of the answer. If this were a party, I'd feel I had to go on, even if the other person hadn't asked Why not? Or Are you planning on having any? They feel free to ask. And almost always, I explain something about wanting them but not enough, or how I wish I had two lives: in one of them I'd have a child by now. But it's no good, not doing something never sounds as real as doing it. I seem to stand in for reserve, my life a keeping back, a state of being not in active service.” ChildrenPoetryPoemHolding BackChildlessnessReserveMultiple Lives Book:No Moon Source: No Moon
“Sometimes I come here just to be a lost mariner but I am never lost: there are the snowflakes frozen to the porthole of a jewelry store, here is the treasure chest open to a single pearl laid on a velvet slab, there is the plashing of faces in the aisles and the row of lockers stuffed with the coats and hats of the drowned and it is night, and the moon rows over the gentle waters of the parking lot.” SometimesFacesNightLostWaterMoonStoresTreasureGentleHatsChestsCoatsPearlsFrozenJewelryParkingVelvetAisleLockersSnowflakeParking LotMarinersSlabsTreasure Chests Book:A Grammar to Waking: Poems Source: A Grammar to Waking: Poems
“There's no telling from poem to poem where this brilliant 'conversation' about maleness and gender will lead---there are poems about husbands and wives, parents and children, Elvis, Apollo, Walt Whitman, rhythms of its politics. Manthology is a remarkably honest and enormously heartening collection.” ChildrenParentWifeHonestHusbandConversationGenderBrilliantRhythmCollectionsApolloHusband And WifeWaltChildren And ParentsMaleness Author:Nancy Eimers
