Two old friends, dead too early. September. And then May. Now here, July, high mid- July: the lettuce tidal with dew, the hedge grown tall with cedar waxwings. A ruby-throat holds in mid-air, sipping long at the feeder. Given death, our fortune is to live the life the dead left without words, to take…
It becomes cold and colder the year has no color in it little Dimitri plays the piano until his fingers stiffen with cold. Cold in the line waiting for bread six hours make us patient thin animals waiting as though bread is an unfamiliar food a kind of miracle we hardly expect. We give it…
MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue Joyce Peseroff Managing Editor Joyce Peseroff CONTRIBUTORS FRANK BIDART'S note on Ralph Hamilton first appeared as part of the Institute of Contemporary Art's show, "Boston Collects Boston." His most recent book is The Book Of The Body (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). ROBERT BLY'S new…
He pushed across the street to where she waited. If this was love, it was the other kind, not any different from what he’d known. For her part, she never thought of it as love, just one person helping another move some household things from one room to another cold room in bad weather. She…
We decided to have the abortion, became killers together. The period that came changed nothing. They were dead, that young couple who had been for life. As we talked of it in bed, the crash was not a surprise. We went to the window, looked at the crushed cars and the gleaming curved shears of…
The horse beneath me seemed To know what course to steer Through the horror of snow I dreamed, And so I had no fear, Nor was I chilled to death By the wind’s white shudders, thanks To the veils of his patient breath And the mist of sweat from his flanks. It seemed that all…
When the shift was over he went out and stood under the night sky a mile from the darkened baseball stadium and waited for the bus. He could taste nickel under his tongue, and when he swiped the back of his hand across his nose he caught the smell of hydrochloric acid. There were clouds…
The gendarme came to tell me you had hung yourself on the door of a rented room like an overcoat like a bathrobe hung from a hook; when they forced the door open your feet pushed against the floor. Inside your skull there was no room for us your circuits forgot me. Even in Paris…
The sky begins nearer the ground when a red shirt hangs on the line in rain, the rain invisible until wind pushes it sideways, the long diagonals striping the air, taut as if they passed through hands. Like something valuable, spoons, with their silver tongues on the porch, leap where the string pierced them; the…
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