I didn’t want to only dream in black and white, but when the colors came back they frightened me, the reds I’d thought I craved, their technicolor poisons shimmering, an errant lens, a gauzy burning dress. Smooth forms deceive, give way to their own chaos. It seemed all equal signs had fallen off the earth—…
Last summer the Better Boys bloomed, tiny saffron flowers going off like slow Chinese rockets, and set their pinhead fruits. I’d ordered a pint of ladybugs from Burpee’s catalogue and scattered their crimson clock-backs through the furry, pungent leaves. I sat in my resin chair, observing the light of late afternoons move through rinsed branches….
The perfect ease of grain time enough to spill the flavor of a woman carried through the rain. Honey-talk tongues down home dreams a rushed but shapely prayer. Evening lips part to hush questions raised at dawn. The melon yields another slice. Fingers understand. Ecstasy becomes us all. Red cherries become jam. Deep juvenile sleep…
At that time I didn’t understand snow, the absence inside July, water and what holds the water in. Heard “It takes more than a forest to make a tree” in no one’s voice. By then the word meridian was extinct, echo without a face to place it, make it stay. Birds’ theories of heat hunch…
I first heard of Paul Muldoon through the affectionate enthusing of Seamus Heaney, who donned his conspiratorial mien — as if agents of some imagined opposition might be lurking near — and confided that his somewhat younger compatriot was “the real thing.” I sought the work out, though I’ll confess I was some time coming…
It’s been suggested: well kept lawns and fences, white porch swings and toast by the fire. It’s been requested: puppies, a window of blossoming pear trees and a place for robins to nest. But I know that somewhere, out there the town is lit. The players begin to make music in all the…
My eyes must be open because light through the woof of the hut’s weave shows my arm in pin shivers. What wakes me? A howl unfolds outside, fear-in-the-mouth, a breathing trill, certifying the silence after. Sheep in a barn as flimsy as mine drum panic that my bones pick up, an arthritis of fear….
Marilyn Hacker, Squares and Courtyards, poems: Precise, haunting, elegant, and elegiac, Hacker’s ninth volume celebrates her community of friends in Paris and New York and their courage as they live with HIV and cancer. (Norton)
It was one of those things you just have to believe to see. Let’s call him, Kenneth— yes, Kenneth Oboto— sitting statue still, no, say: still as machete death— in a silk, leopard-skin tutu blouse and skullcap, Parade Magazine in hand— on a green-slatted Iowa City park bench, day-one, freshman orientation— like a beautiful, black-eyed…
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