My sweetest friend, spun ’round my wayward rib,
–the place still throbs that you were taken from,
and for the absence from my chest, its crib,
that childish bone must all my wish become.
Now borne within a tent of silken flesh,
as palanquin some holy relic bears,
that bone with which your tender sinews mesh
makes magnet toward which all my [...]

Winter Poem
Upon this hill the moon-glazed spruce are slumped
And shake their shoulders where the snow has clumped;
Stern winds have flailed and scruf the creek with ice,
While on its branch the hunched owl dreams of mice.
The poet speaks of Winter and its chill,
Which now, as elsewhere, visits Chestnut Hill,
Its intersections all askid with cars
And red-cheeked locals [...]

I wonder if they’ve taught you yet in school
About the wondrous thumb of Finn MacCool.
He was a wild and shaggy Irish man:
His shouldergirth comprised so great a span
It might as well have been a bridge of boulders;
And slung across the width of those great shoulders
Was his shillelagh, fashioned from a bone
As hard and hefty as [...]

With rag about my eye and fiddle tune,
I sing no portrait of the scenic world –
Let clouds scud by, and flowers importune,
Or banners in bright sunlight be unfurled
– I shall not mention them, nor pause to count
So many images that grace the eye,
But sniff snuffed wicks before the morning mount,
And taste the thought that blind, [...]

The snow is on the barren twig,
The sun not long to tarry,
Yet through the year to nadir come,
Let’s drink and make us merry!
For Janus is a roguish wit
With beard behind and fore,
Who needn’t pause to drain his cup
From dining on the boar.
So let us toast the babe in straw,
Our winter breath a-steaming
Like nostrils of the [...]

Old Ireland did once with grim serpents abound
That slept in the grasses and weeds,
Who were known in the pubs by their sibilant sound,
Though disguised in thick jackets of tweed.
They plotted and schemed, and seduced and beguiled
–they were always a treacherous crew:
at humankind’s hardships they cynically smiled,
as their tongues flicked the foam from their brew.
Their tongues, [...]

My sweetest friend, spun ‘round my wayward rib, -
the place still throbs that you were taken from,
and for the absence from my chest, its crib,
that childish bone must all my wish become.
Now carried in a silken tent of flesh,
As palanquin some holy relic bears,
That bone which there your tender toils enmesh
Makes magnet toward which all [...]

Within an urn her ashes rest/and seas disquieted with storm/with fish-upyielding calm are blessed/and to the cleaving keel conform.
Her father in his oilskins,/his moustache iced, his eye agleam,/from harvesting that churn of fins/regreets her in a vivid dream.
O Newfoundland!  O Life Severe!/O Rocky Coast and Raging Sea!/How strange to learn that Thou art mere/mind-wrought and [...]