A seemingly obliterating storm Rinses the haze from peaks you hadn't seen before. Red-and-white peppermint parasails Float above the gift shops of Bellagio. In Lake Como, youth bare-breasted and muscular, Fill speedboats and sailboats, a girl With long blond hair stands on her father's shoulders And dives into the polluted waters. The roads dry, you…
Between two worlds life hovers like a star. —Byron for Tomaz It is not so easy to live on the earth as an angel, to imitate the insects that dance around the moon, to return what air we borrow every few seconds. I am going to enter the hour when wind dreamt of a light…
Last summer, composer Ben Yarmolinsky, whom I had never met, called me with the idea of my writing a libretto about the eleven o'clock news, called NewsSongs, commissioned by American Opera Projects. After we agreed on a basic structure, I proceeded to write the text, then-titled Blind Witness NewsSpiel, which is printed here. It differs…
The libretto of The Singers of Lesbos, a two-act opera set in 590 B.C., is very much a work-in-progress, because the composer is still to be chosen. Although I expect to change the libretto in various ways to suit my composer, the set poetic pieces reproduced here should stay much the same. They comprise two…
I'd even given you part of my shared fear: This personal responsibility For a whole world's disease that is our nightmare. —Sidney Keyes About the hearts of dusk that could make pets of dogs the Nazis abandoned as they fled. About turning to answer the dust devil scuffed up by the wind, thinking I heard…
When the Peep-O-Day Boys were laying fire down in the hay-ricks and seed-barns of their Catholic neighbours, the art of portrait-painting reached its height across the water. The fire caught. The flames cracked and the light showed up the scaffold and the wind carried staves of a ballad, the flesh-smell of hatred. And she climbed…
One morning in late January 1990 I realized I had never written an out-and-out valentine. I also kept regretting I'd never written a valentine for Raymond Carver. What kind of poet and lover was I, anyway, I was feeling. It's true I'd tried to live my valentine, but still—no valentines. Was it my working-class avoidance…
After the Lenigrad trials, after solitary confinement most of eleven years in a Siberian gulag, he told us this story. One slice of sour black bread a day. He trimmed off the crust and saved it for the last since it was the best part. Crunchy, even a little sweet. Then he crumbled the slice…
These notebook entries come from my most recent volume of Fragments, a series of spiral-bound commonplace books I've been keeping for (and to) myself since 1950. These twenty-eight entries (of the three-hundred-some written in 1987) come from typically various sectors of my interests at the time. I selected these present entries in the sequence they…
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