1. Today I walk, find countless calla lilies. How anything grows its own perfect white and stays that way—unafraid of world. It is lovely, so I look. It doesn’t matter what it thinks of me. 2. This is what I’ve been given to look at. I never chose to be here— California gardens, riches. There…
Beatrice needed a new liver. Her old one had succumbed to damage suffered in a fall one month earlier from the top of a seven-story parking garage. She lay in a coma while the hospital prepared for her imminent transplant, but she was not asleep. That part of her which was not her broken body…
When it becomes possible to sleep with his brother’s wife, George Norgaard jumps at the chance. He has in fact been wanting to sleep with her for years: he’s spied on her at picnics, at Christmas, and once years ago they kissed too long-but nothing like this. Now they meet in hotels, in bars, at…
He showed me brochures for the last moment of my life. He had done an elaborate makeup job on his wrists, so it would look as if he had tried to commit suicide. He gave me a ring, bright as the eyes of a child on a stupid church trip. Our families threw advice at…
It’s winter in the tiny motel. The man and woman lie down naked and freezing. A blizzard streaming on the television, gloss of ice on the windows, the bourbon a bottle of fire. After love she licks his cold sweat, trying to seal herself into him. Smoke from their cigarettes rising, disappearing as they sink…
Gerald Stern, This Time: New and Selected Poems: In his tenth book, Stern collects many poems, from 1972-1995, that are no longer available in other editions. Those favorite works, along with new poems, including affecting elegies to Larry Levis and Allen Ginsberg, prove why Stern is regarded as one of our masters, a modern Walt…
The organist pumped out the blurred tones of “Just as I Am,” the song sinking like a rusted hook in Jack’s chest. Jack locked his ankles, clenched his knees to the underside of the slick oak pew as his grandfather, Emmett, snored quietly beside him. Stop it. Please stop it, Jack said to the whirling…
How many nights have I lain here like this, feverish with plans, with fears, with the last sentence someone spoke, still trying to finish a conversation already over? How many nights were wasted in not sleeping, how many in sleep—I don’t know how many hungers there are, how much radiance or salt, how many times…
Derek Walcott, The Bounty, poems: The 1992 Nobel Prize winner lovingly evokes his native land, the island of St. Lucia, in this luminous new book. Haunting, magnificent, The Bounty gives us Walcott at the top of his form. (Noonday)
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