A man who works in our bank tells me, because I have a Dutch name, that in the war his battalion liberated Maastricht. “We all went back years later, and the people gave us a real celebration. . .” A weekend in Maastricht! Pastry shops in ancient grey buildings. Our host, whose arm was paralyzed…
I. Insomnia The bulb at the front door burns and burns. If it were a white rose it would tire of blooming through another endless night. The moon knows the routine; it beats the bushes from east to west and sets empty-handed. Again the one she is waiting for has outrun the moon. II. Old…
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…
To whom it should concern: Lucky for me you're not the worrying sort. Lucky for you I don't write often, considering the miseries I'm heir(ess) to. Also my terror and loss. What I need to know is, Where do I/we stand? Grammar and punctuation aside – for I have not for-gotten those shockwaves you suffer…
— for J.H.W. The house sits like a hat too small for the bald hill newly scraped and planted with tentative grass. In the picture you took to ponder, to decide whether to buy, the poplar that plumes the ground like a giant swaying peacock feather is almost invisible, a sprouting barely alive. Scotch pine…
You call them dragonflies But you come from another country Of snow and unions, without a summer Worth the name. I passed my childhood Picking them off the wire fence That kept my father’s junkyard From my mother’s house, and bringing them Back to the concrete slab — both morgue And front porch — where…
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