After the cocoon, then the monarch; after the first frost on the glass, we watch the leaves: red for maple, brown for oak. For the last day, wings. In the ancient ceremony silent players enter the festive houses, play dice with the citizens. So these days follow, September to November, like the click of bone…
I Having roughed up the waters wind explodes like the curses from fist-ravaged lips in the cold superpower's innards, squeezing trite wobbles of the do-re-mi from sooted trumpets that lisp. Nonprincess and porous nonfrogs hug the terrain, and a star shines its…
All identity is active statement. —George Steiner 1. A file of dated letters and a voice the important survivor agrees at last to your visit, two days for your recorder. What you know, you review, earliest meetings, estrangements, awkward returnings, rumors and echoes of rumors, questions, a desire to breathe that air. Finally hours of…
for Dawn Chin, a student from Korea You're barely twenty. Your last essay for me begins: “Until I realized the value of life, I sure went through a lot of anguish of the heart.” All our Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays together, I put in of and the and couldn't explain why we say, “I tried to…
June 4, 1977 A falling star, or worse, a planet (true or bogus) may thrill your idle eye with its quick hocus-pocus. Look, look then at that locus which doesn't deserve sharp focus. * * * There frowning forests stand decked out in rags and tatters. Departing from point ‘A,’ a train there bravely scatters its…
In a dirt village near Sierra Plata, men who are their own shadows, their own wives, drive flatbeds to the taverns; sweat-stained, with gold dust stuffed in little sacks that dangle along the hard edges, the steel curves of their bodies. Tense as switchblades, they wait for the finger-touch of a woman, a thief, or…
Dipping our shoulders under with each lunge we twelve far-pregnant women stride the shallow children's pool stretching our bulbous bodies out. Blue pool. White light. Late afternoon: the beams surge low and full. “The sun is god.” A dozen heads rock: shrugs pushing the shimmer of round into flat. Each color tends to color the…
Please don't take the cemeteries. We can't sleep when the dead fidget in air, their frantic fingers hushing the wind. We'll give bread, or pastures, even the trees tucked into themselves like frightened children. But please don't take the cemeteries. For each stone there is a blossom, a tear, an empty room where someone waits…
All night I search the dead for inspiration. Outside, the lawns have turned to wilderness. Plows turning the snow. Gusts of wind dissolve in a tangle of elms. Ice forms on the new roof. Weakens it. Too much trying has finally ended. No one seems ever to come or to go. Only the taillights of…
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