i. In late October, daylight stood with one leg in the dark. A boy swung himself through his unzippered jacket to work his feet up. Then monkey-handed he headed for a part of the branch he was heavier than and bobbed there like a hunk of suet. But with girls it was different: you came…
There were two women I thought might be able to help me, or rather help Lance, and that night, sitting on the bus on the way home from the hospital, I vowed to find one or both of them the next day, even if I had to cancel a couple of my afternoon classes to…
This empty feeling that makes me fearful I’ll disappear the minute I stop thinking May only mean that beyond the kitchen window, in the dark, The minions of the past are gathering, Waiting for the dishes to be cleared away So they can hustle supper into oblivion. This feeling may only mean that supper’s…
—And yet this great wink of eternity October was what it had already become when I entered the walled graveyard, the air golden and remote in the last minutes before evening. A bedstand and springs made the gate, pulled aside, and the stones faced the sunset, all those not overturned, flung …
How charitable to call it fruit, when almost nothing inside it can be eaten. Just the gelatin that thinly rinds the unpalatable seed. The rest of it all pith, all bitter, hardly a meal, even for a thin girl. But enough, at least in the myth, to be what ties Persephone half the year to…
She had strong views on Mrs. Humphry Ward, The Brontës, poor souls, women called George, Novelists known as A Lady. There was always An edginess. Whenever we went too far, Children or parent, she’d flare Oh you Fanthorpes! As if at some foreign breed. She lost some magic when she married us….
for X— When cabbalists declare Each deed we do affects Beings in other worlds, My thought turns round to sex, As it inclines to do, As needle to true north, Considering our case, Weighing it back and forth. What if we had undressed That chaste July, and what If we were being watched…
Robert Pinsky: The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996. This graceful, welcome collection gathers four of Pinsky’s books, as well as new works. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
from In the Houses of the Good People When I was a girl I had a place in the stable I’d go to be alone. I cleaned it of all the spider webs and laid down a layer of fresh straw. When Mother began her travail with Elizabeth, I went there to get away…
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