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.

This is the enclosure my family
has dreamed of, and brought into being

I’ve seen those paintings and I think he must hate women.
      Must hate
us. I imagine you’d say they aren’t about us, our bodies,

In my dream of Joseph Beuys
      I’m writing a hymn for him, a hymn
of praise, and he stares out at me

Summer afternoon, Henry James said,
the most beautiful words in the language.

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

wrapped in a blanket of green leaves,