Out on the Dyckman Street platform because there's no one else to fetch the magazine mail from its distant post-box, something between bag-lady, mountaineer, and Santa Claus, I snort cold damp air, stamp to shift the weight of twenty dozen women's manuscripts. Twelve will, if merely literate, eclipse the dismal two-hundred-and-twenty-eight I'll read later —…
I used to watch your wrists in class; the black hair curling on the backs of your hands, your cuffs closing in small pearl buttons. You chainsmoked, apologizing between cigarettes. You waved the book at us, frustrated, yelling the question—always the same question, “Don’t you see this? Don’t you get this?” Did you know all…
She pulls down her pants at parties. “You really don’t know a person till you fuck em.” jeans around her knees she balances, drink with cigarette and slips her free fingers to the wet in between. She swirls them clean in her scotch and sips approvingly the added ingredient. “I like mine straight up.”
Excerpts from Against Our Vanishing: Winter Conversations with Allen Grossman on the Theory and Practice of Poetry, to be published this fall by Rowan Tree Press (124 Chestnut Street, Boston, Mass. 02108). H I hope that one thing we can talk about today is the difficulty of poems and the kinds of value that can…
a Persian miniature The architecture of dreams: this part of the page is large enough to be a world — several in fact. Walls which are sky hold baby chicks, dove, ducks, phoenix, and a wolf who floats up incautiously, having lost his perspective. The least flowers, transforming the lapis lazuli, gold…
As if suddenly reincarnated One lunch-hour as Saint Sebastian, pierced and visible, The weathercock loses his freedom to turn, Crowds advance on him like the four winds. And in the street, under Transparent branches of trees Single, fixed, waving softly, Human figures wave their transparent hands. Down to the roots not a pocket, a closet…
“A l’usage de M. et Mme Van Gramberen“ —The convent phrase (nothing is to be mine, Everything ours) marked the small round enclosure, Its table and bench. Distinguished From the other old people, from the nuns’ gravel They sat in the windmill’s afternoon shadow, half Hidden by a moving carthorse’s huge blond rump And quarrelled…
You never come to shoplift but to leave things: rhinestone butterflies you borrowed from mother’s vanity, assorted lengths of nails, your brother’s manic metronome that, boxed and locked, still ticks on like the crocodile in Peter Pan. You have to be discreet and furtive as a Gideon Bible placement clerk, dart your hand out when…
1/ He stands before the riddle of his answer. Man. And makes himself thereby king. And slowly again sphinx. What it is to marry one’s feeling. And think.
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