Howard Nemerov

This morning, between two branches of a
Beside the door, epeira once
Has spun and signed his tapestry and trap.
I test his early-warning system

Who can remember back to the first poets,
The greatest ones, greater even than Orpheus?
No one has remembered that far back Or now considers, among the artifacts,
And bones and cantilevered inference The past is made of, those…

People are putting up storm windows now,
Or were, this morning, until the heavy rain Drove them indoors.
So, coming home at noon,
I saw storm windows lying on the ground

It is true, that even in the best-run state Such things will happen; it is true,
What’s done is done.
The law, whereby we hate Our hatred, sees no fire in the flue But by the smoke, and not for thought alone It punishes, but for the…

The fishermen on Lake Michigan, sometimes,
For kicks, they spit two hunks of bait on
At either end of a single length of
And toss that up among the scavenging gulls,

You know the old story Ann Landers
About the housewife in her basement doing the wash?
She's wearing her nightie, and she thinks, "Well, hell,
I might's well put this in as well," and

On the long shore, lit by the
To show them properly alone,
Two lovers suddenly
So that their shadows were as one.

Two universes mosey down the
Connected by love and a leash and nothing else.
Mostly I look at lamplight through the
While he mooches along with tail up and snout down

Before you can learn the trees, you have to
The language of the trees.
That's done indoors,
Out of a book, which now you think of

A door sunk in a hillside, with a bolt thick as the boy’s arm, and behind that door the walls of ice, melting a blue, faint light, an air of cedar branches, sawdust, fern: decaying seasons keeping from decay.
A summer guest, the boy had…