“One of the jobs of poetry is to make the unbearable bearable, not by falsehood but by clear, precise confrontation.”

The delectable names of harsh places:
Cilicia Aspera, Estremadura.
In that smooth wave of cello-sound, Mojave,

He is no one I really know.
The sun-charred, gaunt young man
By the highway’s edge in Kansas
Thirty-odd years ago.

    These children playing at statues fill
The gardens with their shrillness; in a planned
And planted grove they fling from the swinger’s hand