Howard Nemerov

You see them vanish in their speeding cars,
The many people hastening through the world,
And wonder what they would have done
This time of time speed distance, random

Across the millstream below the bridge Seven blue swallows divide the air In shapes invisible and evanescent,
Kaleidoscopic beyond the mind’s Or memory’s power to keep them there
“History is where tensions were,” “Form is the diagram of ...

They're taking down a tree at the front door,
The power saw is snarling at some nerves,
Whining at others
Now and then it grunts,

Innocence
In a sense
In no sense
Was that it

My dear,
I wonder if before the end You ever thought about a children’s game— I’m sure you must have played it too—in which You ran along a narrow garden wall Pretending it to be a mountain ledge So steep a snowy darkness fell away On either ...

The house is so quiet now The vacuum cleaner sulks in the corner closet,
Its bag limp as a stopped lung, its mouth Grinning into the floor, maybe at my Slovenly life, my dog-dead youth
I’ve lived this way long enough,
But when my ol...

He didn't want to do it with skill,
He'd had enough of skill
If he never
Another villanelle, it would be too soon;

Here at the Super Duper, in a glass
Supplied by a rill of cold fresh
Running down a glass washboard at one
And siphoned off at the other, and

By the dry road the fathers cough and spit,
This is their room
They are the ones who hung That bloody sun upon the southern wall And crushed the armored beetle to the floor
The father’s skin is seamed and dry, the map Of that wild r...

Unbridled licentiousness with no holds barred,
Immediate and mutual lust,
In the heat, upon demand, aroused
And satisfied again, lechery unlimited

I met a guy I used to know, who said:"You take your '57 Karnak, now,
The model that they called their Coop de
That had the pointy rubber boobs for bumpers—You take that car, owned by a nigger
Likelier'n not, with half its chromium

I tell you that I see her still At the dark entrance of the hall
One gas lamp burning near her shoulder Shone also from her other side Where hung the long inaccurate glass Whose pictures were as troubled water
An immense shadow had its h...