Donald Revell Poems

I am looking at a smallpox vaccination scar
In a war movie on the arm
Of a young actor. He has just swum
...

Virgil watched them
Crossing the river away from him
The fathers without their children
Only a little while
...

A jet of mere phantom
Is a brook, as the land around
Turns rocky and hollow.
Those airplane sounds
...

It has never been so easy to cry
openly or to acknowledge children.
Never before could I walk directly
to the center of an island city
feeling the automatism of millions
...

Who will you point to? In the needle's eye,
or selling what you won at the strait gate,
who will know how to kiss you and just when
...

It is the right time for hallucinations.
Drowning in a sty, the sailor
feels the ocean's buoyancy.
...

Birds small enough to nest in our young cypress
Are physicians to us

They burst from the tree exactly
Where the mind ends and the eye sees
...

When the world was loveliness I was
A composer, Borodin, my left eye
Level with the floor beside toy men.
Wild work and havoc they made,
...

Death calls my dog by the wrong name.
A little man when I was small, Death grew
Beside me, always taller, but always
Confused as I have almost never been.
...

Linoleum and half a dozen eggs
In 1960
Many towered Ilium
A brand name and a shopping list too
...