Nature is never wrong, the lilies say, Simply alive in the pond, life goes on. Despite carnivorous violence, firestorms, We are porcelain quiet. Sit on this bench, Listen to the Baroque Ensemble play Music composed during the French Revolution; cherish the bees Closed in our petals, close your eyes, Close them, close yourself in these…
This happened just once. Desire had stopped at some remote crossroads. I don't know whose heart just stood there without an owner. It was one of those little folds in time when the absurd moon could rise without a purpose. We all knew where melancholy could lurk in ravines, or even lie sprawled out by…
Porno Diva Numero Uno is a thirty-six section song, written in the lost form of "single transmission," inspired to some degree by the art and remarks of Marcel Duchamp. A note on Porno Diva and Sections 4-6 follow. (Another note and Sections 9 and 11 appeared recently in the Cimarron Review.) Note Are questions like…
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…
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