Article

  • The Dead

    The dead come, looking for their shoes. It is all right if we can’t find them: it was only the dark, inside, they wanted. It is all right. They can be the shadow of a boulder, or the oak leaves falling, one by one. There have been so many of them, and so few of…

  • East European Cooking

    While Marquis De Sade had himself buggered, O just around the time the Turks Were roasting my ancestors on a spit, Goethe wrote “The Sorrows of Young Werther.” It was chilly, raw, bleak, down-at-the-mouth We were slurping bean soup with smoked sausage On 2nd Avenue where years before I saw a horse Pull a wagon…

  • Robert Lowell: His Death

    We will not find you by going back to London, not even in another heat-wave of the century, the fire-bells ringing peacefully in the empty buildings all day Sunday. . . or the floor-through room above Earl’s Court, already otherworldly: two or three chairs; worm-eaten dark scrollwork around the Jacobean mirror; the chest with a…

  • The Visit

    No resolution, understanding when she comes abrupt, final anger, rage at the painful displacement, the brutal use of rational love, the meagerness of the intentional offering.

  • Married Dreams

    I am driftwood on his beach, without an Uncle or a radio. I used to be a Spanish ship. Thinking of Seville, mahogany, he picks me up feeling both superior and sorry. *     *      * Or I am brave and he is smaller than the smallest thing he can remember. They had him sit for hours…

  • Onlie X

    The constant X equals all variables: even strangers soon to be wonders just amount to X. Cistercians, all `sister’, in any case sexless, insist the last & best is left for X. So Wilde’s little swallow made children cry, don’t fly! But action is prayer for the poor and/or ill; just makes equal stone and…