The poetry writing was rewarded with publication in national magazines, with fellowships, and with a job teaching poetry at Cornell University in 1971. I lived and dreamed and read and wrote poetry every hour of every day for more than ten years. I thought of language in terms of metaphor and cadence, line break and rhyme. I loved the compression and indirection of poetry, the implicitness of poetry. The air moves as if something just left.
Cool razors circulate touching the skin with wet silk.
Breathing clear cheese. Mold flowers grow like plastered snowballs on the walls, rust-lacquered pipes. The heads of translucent shoots crawl out of the potato bin and run like wires to the window. Once cut straight and firm the walls have dripped and rotted to black jelly. Jam grows blue fur.