“In truth, I’m still slightly embarrassed to say, I am a poet. I’d rather say, I make poems.”

On poetry’s power to suspend violence: “It can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities.”

“A female who expresses herself decisively seems to this world someone armed with ammunition.”

It doesn’t smell here.  
I can be whoever I want to be.
I can leave my dull citizen-life behind,
but have you ever walked around
looking for what was already
in your hands? Standing upright,

Waiting for a deceased friend’s cat to die
is almost unbearable. “This is where you live now,”
I explain. “Please stop crying.” But he is like a widower 

I don’t really like the ferries that make the water a scary vortex,
or the blurry white sun that blinds me, or the adorable small families 
of distressed ducklings that swim in a panic when a speedboat cuts 

I lived in a rooming house then 
and tried to be good but was a real 
disappointment. A man without cunning 

On this tenth day of the year, I play Stravinsky
and sip vodka from a paper cup, taking in the view.
Tendrils twining, leaves rippling, guts absorbing nutrients,

Hansel and Gretel were picking strawberries 
and listening to a bronze cuckoo.  
As the forest mist thickened, 

The transfer is done in a dark room
with a red light to keep them calm.  
Still, it’s stressful, hanging upside down, 

The tent men arrived bearing sledgehammers
and were young enough to be my sons.  
After rolling out the canvas, they drove rods 

I was looking 
for the two 
black men

In the dream,
a priest said
it was time

It’s nice to have a lake to love me,
that can see under all my disguises—
where there is only animal survival

Eating a sugar sandwich, I sit at the kitchen table
admiring the geraniums outside the window,
their big heads as American as Martha Washington.

Why do they lie down
when I shoot them?
Such open,

My house is mine:
the choice of menu,
the radio and television,

I sit on the dock for a haircut and watch
as summer spreads out, relieving the general,
indiscriminate gray, like a mouthful of gin

I came from a place with a hole in it,
my body once its body, behind a beard of hair.   
And after I emerged, all dripping wet,

I, detaching myself from the human I, Henri,
without thick eyeglasses or rubberized white skin,
stretched out like a sinewy cat in the brown grass

Naked but for dainty shoes, garter
and a ribbon in her long red hair,
she takes him in the way history takes us in:

While others were discussing
the styles of metopes,
I lay down in the Temple of Zeus

With a shriek gulls fled across a black sky,
all of us under the pier were silent,
my blood ached from waiting, then we resumed.

Scrawling the letters of my name,
I found and changed what I became:

first, HERON LICE emerged,

The record skips in the parlor
when the gurney wheels past.
Mother’s on her way to maternity.

On the way to Mass, by chance,
I spotted you on the boulevard at a café
with your wife and her mother. 

 How could I not have taken him home:
his eyes shone a gentian blue,
his name was Jesus, and I found him alone

is feeding his canaries on the terrace
when the Gypsies start to sing.
Dinner candles have long guttered,

If it’s spring in the city, have the marchers,
each one with a shrieking whistle, short-circuited the streets,
their cause as grave as the dirty cabs growling at their feet?

Such is the way with monumental things:
to make us see and wonder.
The unreserved calm of the place

It was premonitions that kept us restless
the night before, visions of a gemlike lagoon
we’d push off into, the slim canoe

“It has taken me some days to sit at his desk.”

“A man’s life is not a thing to sentimentalize.”

Why have I come so far on a literary pilgrimage? I want to be unafraid to move in the world again. “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?” Bishop asks in her poem “Questions of Travel.” Am I, like her, dreaming my dream and having it too?

An entry from the poet Henri Cole's notebook on meeting Chuck Close in the mid-1990s in Rome

  He worked hard and now can rest. He was one of America’s best-loved poets and won all the literary awards. At eighty-six, he had his first New York Times best seller, with Essays After Eighty, celebrating the indignities of growing old. I once g…

  We must have met in 1980, when I was twenty-four. I was a graduate student in New York City. Sandy was teaching in New Haven. This was before email, Facebook, and Twitter. Poets wrote letters and talked on the telephone (landlines!). Sandy had j…