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  • This Isn’t A Story

    This isn't a story I want to tell, or need to. I've shoveled the night's hard snowfall from the drive and heaped it, mailbox-high, for the neighbor kids to stomp over. I've fed the squirrels and put out black sunflower and wild weed seed for the birds— the female cardinal rose and dusky and black…

  • Meurig Dafydd to His Mistress

    No word I huffed when Stradling urged the squire to throw my eulogy on the fire. The fiddlers laughed. I, snow-silent, proud, did not melt. But I'm spitless now, my pearl, my buttercup, my bread-fruit. I rattle their silver in my pocket. I have other stanzas for harp and lute, other gullible lords to flatter….

  • 67

    I live with my contradictions intact, seeking transcendence but loving bread. I shrug at both and from behind the summer screen I look out upon the dark, knowing death as one form of transcendence, but so is life.

  • Eugenio Montale

    The shift from Eugenio Montale's first three books—high modernist poetry, lyrically intense, elaborately wrought, musically intricate, elliptical—to his last four (Satura, the two Diaries of 1971 and 1972, and the Quaderno di quattro anni) for the translator poses obvious problems, above all of tone and continuity. The late poetry, for instance, is no less dense…

  • To the Storm’s End

         In my most recent book, City Life, I used interlocking dramatic monologues to develop a plot and subplot. Finishing it gave me the impetus to experiment with shaping a musical structure out of inter- locking sequences, each sequence resonating with the others.      To the Storm's End is one of the sequences I'm working on in…

  • Tin Ceiling, Pecs, Hungary

    Up there my father marches off into Guadalcanal, Guam, his face      numb from lying in the green tub to break the 105-degree malarial      fever. My brother is there, too, Mae Westing over      Okinawa until they gather him up and place him in the nineteenth bunk, tenth      floor of the Albany Veterans' Hospital. Behind them a…

  • The Arrival

    I pull the bed slowly open, I open the lips of the bed, get the stack of fresh underpants out of the suitcase—peach, white, cherry, quince, pussy willow, I choose a color and put them on, I travel with the stack for the stack's caress, dry and soft. I enter the soft birth-lips of the…