No one, Herakleitos said, crosses the same river twice. True enough. Every gain's composed of losses. Think, as Robert Duncan has, of years as catches where only that which one loves well surpasses our diurnal habit of suffering and folly. Years pass, crawling into years. Too damned bad for one who worships childhood or youth….
Saint-Julien de Peyrolas Gard 18 October 1941 Mr Xavier Vallat Commissioner for Jewish Affairs Vichy Sir: I must take you to be in some way my superior; for while I have not yet come to grasp what now is thought to be a Jew, I must hear the silence that met my request, for a…
1 A morning meditation in mid-May, the plane trees profligate on this island on Broadway and 105th, ten years of morning walks along these storefronts, the beautiful names before me now, Santerellos, Erik’s Hair King, Lucky Farm Fruits and Vegetables, the urban wind in the lindens, the shock of gray-black water on the downslopes of…
A weak man is like a broken jug: although you pour in every kindness, you pour in vain: nothing is contained. * * * The vile mouth of the exorcist drives away demons, not by virtue of his ritual, but by the shit he speaks. * * * The poor painter captures only form, no other. To find the…
Sheffield Pastorals has no plot—only the interweaving of a number of themes. Each section is a cluster of self-contained, slightly discon- nected lines, in the manner of a ghazal, but unlike the ghazal all the lines of the section focus on a common subject. I don't know how many sections the poem will finally have….
1 I looked out over Mexico City's notorious skyless skies, and I looked further and the distances contracted to a fist. Diverging currents of traffic; skies without ocher and ultramarine. Over the jagged faded silhouette of the city; propane tanks perch like pigs at a trough on the rooftops. Five years ago the earthquake, five…
My friend and I compare love-at-first-sights, seeing whose got there truly first because sight did it to them. I say it's only language. Without those words, that same order, no love that magnets onto the lover through just walking into a room and looking. All through our teens, getting ready for eyeball-to- eyeball link-ups, so…
The two books I think I am cooking up are: 1. Thingsomeness. Orthodox verse (villanelles, etc.) plus some less orthodox experiments in sound repetition (e.g., borzoi and for joy, echo and threshold). 2. Brass and Percussion: Pros Songs. Derived somewhat frmo classical Greek (“logaedic”) and Chinese fu models (Pound includes the…
My pale inner left arm pierced, and withdrawn; the sweat-heated pillow flattened under my neck; I lay and fingered my mental parts. A draft stirred the red curtain: a figure at the foot of the bed, observing like a brother. Not much trace of him, before our trouble. . . But I needed nothing there….
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