Anne Winters Poems

Through the meridian's fine blue hairlines, the admirals are converging
in their fish-hulled ships, with their frogmen and sirens, and tanks with knotted chain flails
that beat the ground before them as they crawl.
...

After three months, Virginia is still a frontier.
Late at night, I close the door
on my husband practicing Mozart, the dishpan fills
and the network affiliates sign off one by one.
...

Sparrows tapping your shutters louvres? snow owls
guano your eaves? Spring rainstorms sway
in your gutters; down-cellar a green pipe pearls
...

Fleeing his clubs, dull honors, wives, the ageing Hardy
hunches down in his potting-shed with his thumbtip-fumbled, fine-
printed seed catalogue's inflorescences—
peripherally glimpsing the oxygenless blue line
...

All middle age invisible to us, all age
passed close enough behind to seize our napehairs
and whisper in a voice all thatch and smoke
some village-elder warning, some rasped-out
...

Four-fifty. The palings of Trinity Church
Burying Ground, a few inches above the earth,
are sunk in green light. The low stones
...

Now the god of rainy August hangs his mask
among the city's spires and balustrades
and stone clocktowers half-effaced in clouds.
...

1

It opens as a long lamplit evening
with Rembrandt, stretched out with the glossy book
of his Works on Paper. Brown-petal etchings and drawings:
nut-brown, browner, irreclaimable rills
...