I'm not Charles Darwin . . . I'm a computer, A logic machine modeled after the brain, But the brain is more than a logic machine, The brain takes everything and makes it new; It snaps like a turtle at the sources of novelty. If an object is bumpy, I respond to it; If an…
At this point in the development of “When All the Walls Are Down,” the poem and I have brought each other as far as we can go. From now on, I suspect, revision will mainly involve aeration. Without it the poem would be, as my Eve says of Adam, “plunged into his talk's / spring-tide”…
Tourniquet tight, spade vein rising, I must have done it Three or four times before I realized it was me easing the needle Into my vein. My friends crouched, waiting for their turn, Our eyes fixed on the plunger slowly pressing down. It was as close as I'd ever felt to anyone, those moments We…
Three old women sat knitting In front Every time I went by. Good evening, ladies, I'd say. Good morning, too, For it's a lovely day. Finding it in myself to whistle While they stared at me, The way the deaf stare, The deaf and dumb. Two of them resuming their knitting, The third still with…
My Entries aren't a journal in the ordinary sense, a record of occurrences: they are entries into ideas. An event that strikes me as significant or something I've read in a book or newspaper may help me to clarify my ideas and induce me to write a page or two. Making these remarks clears my…
These are among my favorite poems I have written because they came to me effortlessly, like gifts. One day I found myself writing a playful love poem to a sculpture of twelve green cabbages neatly laid out in a plot on the flagstone courtyard of the Fogg Art Museum. Afterwards, other works of sculpture and…
On their last day in Puerto Vallarta, the fathers rented horses. Ellen's father let her come along, though she was only eleven and hadn't ridden before. She stayed close to his side, staring at the tin shacks and rows of hobbled corn along the back streets. Her father drank wine from a pig-bladder pouch and…
New York, January. I am in the act of reaching out a hand to put a letter in the mailbox. The letter is a request to an old acquaintance (old now, perhaps; he certainly seemed old to me twenty years ago) for advice about a book I am contemplating, a gathering of recollections about my…
In his “Heiligenstadt Testament” Beethoven— let me start over— Joseph Jefferson etched into his desk with a switchblade the legend WHY THE FUK AM I DOING HERE? then underlined it, then inked his question in with ballpoint blue and red. For the sake of his transcendent art, Beethoven hoped “to endure to the end.” Joe…
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