Cold starts with the sun gone down
warming up at early dawn

Overcast at break of day

It must be cold in the ground these winter mornings.
            The man who delivers the paper drives
            up our hill each dawn, and the news arrives

  Imagine our nation is a giant boy,
down on his knees in a giant kitchen—
trucks and trains and stupendous armies
marching across the mop-clean floor.

What false color, a fickle color, whatever color will do.
Point us at a sunset,
and we are golden. Open us to the world, and we are blue.

The thing to avoid is in that frame,
the reasoned screen fixing light
and shade in pithy squares of shape.

It's Papa's coat she's wrapped in,
his old wool Lodenmantel, like a child

wrapped in a blanket of green leaves,

Summer afternoon, Henry James said,
the most beautiful words in the language.
I wonder if he saw those summer afternoons

Theirs is a heroic lot, cast away
and glistening so silently among the rubbish.
There are so many secret places

The Japanese say the size of a man's ear
will determine his wealth:
a large ear like the Buddha's

I am custodian of close things.
Even winter trees have blurred
To leaf, and faces come upon me