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  • Flute Song

    Earth-spirit, wood-spirit, stone, father, Other, exposed root I said goodbye to by the river, where are you now? I fondle a glass eye. The eye reflects leaves, stars, galaxies. . . . Space was always my demon, the unreachable. From a black hole a wavering flute song, readable.

  • These Foolish Things

    Bitter words whispered in a railroad station. A hair caught in a wallet’s web. Then: stroll the streets the way the poets did or some novel character musing after night’s revels, clutching a glove, a bit of silk, a talisman of disillusion. On Rue Huchette a gypsy breathes fire for spare change. Acrid whips of…

  • A Compassionate Leave

    Nothing ever seemed to go right for the 57th Division. It had come overseas just in time to take heavy casualties in the Battle of the Bulge; then, too-quickly strengthened with masses of new replacements, it had plodded through further combat in eastern France and in Germany, never doing badly but never doing especially well,…

  • Cry For Comfort

    The moon clouds over and is done. The Polish crones roam Mutual Tower spitting, polishing, sifting the trash for small gifts their grandchildren will turn into trash. Deep in the folds of the dark, some poor infant cries and cries for comfort and will not be calmed. Under the police siren’s wail it continues, clearing…

  • There Is Only One

    Nothing is and nothing in itself is a mountain. I know nothing except certain brief anecdotes: The wall has bricks. The Navy has cigarettes. The wide world is an old horizon. The chair is flat and without boundaries. There is no reason to call it a chair. But we do, and you know it is…

  • Saturos

    Ulysses’ shadow dancing with a herd of monsters, winding its paleo-way through corridors half-shed of horse and ibex It winds into a tower Gaudi dreamed children blowing like sky-blue fluff across the roof of a world without straight line or right angle So that the wily meanderer still lives even if in Catholic drag —…

  • In The Garment District

    Nothing like 10 in the morning for making love — cats glaring from the table opposite, the dog watching gloomily from the rug, and after, opening cans of their food, you in the shower singing while elevators ring up through the sidewalk, carrying their racks of dresses, the noises of ordinary business: unloading, loading. Later,…

  • Contributors’ Notes

    MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue James Randall Associate Editor for This Issue Richard Tillinghast Managing Editor Joyce Peseroff CONTRIBUTORS ALEXANDER ALBERTUS, who lives in Mill Valley, California, is translating a selection of poems by the Norwegian poet, Inger Hagerup. The poems in this issue represent his first publication in…