Words appear in the mist
behind a window, someone looming in red,
tracing letters with his finger. He appears
blurred through his writing, his message
private, backwards.

From her bedroom window a woman waves. I thought
she waved to me: she
cleans the glass
with a white rag
stroking side to side.

A man is making ridiculous faces
from his window over the calm harbor.
I realize he is singing.
Leaving a trail in the sand
a boy bulls a blue rowboat by a rope,
and presses it into the water.

John Witte’s poems are like hammer blows, accurate, solid, satisfying. His cries ring out in our desert, forlorn and too-soon wise. He is one of those poets who doesn’t suffer from being a modern, who is able to contain, under the same hat, what is rich and full and abundant (what we said we lost) and what is nervous and new and wild. It is his language that makes this possible, but behind the language his knowledge, and grace and sadness, the “tiny bell in his throat.” He is an important new poet.

-Gerald Stern