About four that afternoon the thunder and lightning began again. The five women seated about Mrs. Boone's one-room apartment grew still and spoke with lowered voices and in whispers, when they spoke at all: they were no longer young, and they had all been raised to believe that such weather was the closest thing to…
We live on dead worlds. I can recall my first meeting with Ul'Lyu, when I began to realize what that meant. And this was only our first meeting. This was before I came to see the carnival lights inside her, before I started to needle her with my pet rhyme on her name, "you jewel-you,…
The interview with Michael S. Harper took place in Harper's condominium, a reconstructed factory building in downtown Providence. There was a huge decorated Christmas tree, a good feeling of space in the giant, somewhat loosely partitioned main room, and Michael's wife, Shirley, and their three children, Roland, Patrice and Rachel were about. During the interview,…
The time comes when you count the names — whether Dim or flaming in the head’s dark, or whether In stone cut, time-crumbling or moss-glutted. You count the names to reconstruct yourself. But a face remembered may blur, even as you stare At a headstone. Or sometimes a face, as though from air, Will stare…
Men who do not wear watches know The sad infusion a concave glass Withholds. A life readies For forgetfulness its forward distances, But these wheels return their moment In the thrash of sex. When afterwards You ask what time it is, I cannot forswear How near we are to that far country Where the sun…
Hold fast to conscience and push deliberately towards self-mastery. — Seamus Heaney Upstairs in the high perch the strands of coallight discoursing over the house and cottage in County Wicklow the burial ruins temper the light of the skull shone on our heathen forebears, sunlight and periscoped floss of Catherine’s cries in the glen where…
I. The Romantics were right. Gothic buildings are best seen in ruin: sky-sprung clerestories in wild brambles — bare ruin’d quires — Romanesque arches reconstructed by the mind, tumbled-over stones to stumble on in a field of grey violets, in a place you can no longer drive to. When I walk by the Neo-Gothic duPont…
She turned into the drawing-room for privacy, but Henry and Eleanor had likewise retreated thither, and were at that moment deep in consultation about her. She drew back, trying to beg their pardon, but was, with gentle violence, forced to return . . . —Northanger Abbey When Henry and his sister Eleanor brought Miss Morland…
For those who are neither hero of myth nor witness to history: remember all life is holy. In the year of the blizzard in the month of February I have traipsed up the middle of Lexington Avenue, a spectacular middle passage in the snow to my own poetry reading: James Wright, Philip Levine, each having…
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