It is spring, and flamingoes return to the Coggios' lawn, along with the virgin in her sky-blue robe. Inside the miniature picket fence, daisy pinwheels are spinning; a pair of young deer graze and listen. I listen too, imagining the voices of the Coggios calling to me from out behind the house where they take…
1 Getting out after reading, or writing, late — or was it waiting for a call? — past the windows where, on hot nights, they don’t pull all the shades all the way down. . . (I walk by slowly, twice.) Then up a darker, more private street. My footsteps echo. Echo? Someone else’s feet,…
Adorno writes of Stravinsky: "Stravinsky's imitators remained far behind their model, because they did not possess his power of renunciation, that perverse joy in self-denial. . . . To a very large degree taste coincides with the ability to refrain from tempting artistic means." Ralph Hamilton's paintings exhibit to an extraordinary degree the "power of…
Watchman, tell us of the night And what the signs of promice are . . . . -old hymn In my few years as a critic and reviewer, I have been mainly preoccupied with the night rather than the signs of promise. Such criticism no doubt makes enemies, especially among those who fancy that, thanks…
Here came Nathalie: forty-one, agile of body, angular of face, with large blue eyes under a flap of greying bangs, dressed at the moment in a woolen bathrobe with threadbare piping, she was carrying her firstborn baby, a daughter, down the upstairs hallway for an early morning nursing. There were paint buckets to be skirted,…
is still unwinding. It’s 1919, the train’s dropped us in the Panhandle. This landscape is only for the Farmer’s pleasure. We’re stick figures, black things moving in a sunlit picture; how we love is our only secret. The Farmer watches me hour on hour from his velvet chair beside the field. You say it’s…
Words set to music, words that are sung, are not pleasing to the most refined connoisseurs of the art of sound. Among those who still tolerate them, many prefer choral works in which the word disappears; others want to hear only the sonorous arabesque of the voice (without being able to make out a single…
MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue Alan Williamson Managing Editor Joyce Peseroff CONTRIBUTORS STEVEN ABLON is a psychoanalyst, and is on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School. This is his first publication as a poet since college. PAUL BRESLIN teaches at Northwestern University. His poems have appeared in Poetry,…
MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue Dan Wakefield Managing Editor Joyce Peseroff CONTRIBUTORS BROCK BROWER'S Mischief Night will be published next spring by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His other works include The Late Great Creature, a novel, and Other Loyalties, a collection of journalism. SUSAN ENGBERG'S stories have appeared in…
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