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Oxford Street Museum

At eighteen when I worked in Oology, in the Egg Room on the fifth floor, stabled above the door that read Nabokov: Entomology where we looked at tarantulas all during lunch— nature, far from being in me, or something I was “of,” was the courtyard I walked down into, the air a relief from formaldehyde…

Message from the Interior(2)

Walker Evans, No. 2, Scarborough, New York A photograph of destruction without disaster: the slow disengagement of plaster, wood, brick and concrete. One layer strips away from another while ivy that has come up like a poisonous weed guards the edge of the crumbled wreck. The remnant sections of these two walls take the direct…

Yellow Day Like A Still Life

On the table landscape of my desolate kitchen in the middle of Ireland in the bleary damp of spring— butter rises like a greasy fort from a saffron yellow saucer. A washcloth, pale yellow is folded as a miniature tent over the toys the children ranged, militia-like around their breakfast. Doorways in Fitzwilliam Square bear…

All That We Try To Do

I had been thinking about love, how hard It is to remember How to fall in love, How love has the frankness Of giving in and the firmness Of logic, and yet when I tried To discover this order I noticed, far down on the beach, The swimmers testing The water, which must have been…

Poem for G.L.B.

Though you’re an old woman, I mean dead,      I make plans to save you: arrange your voice to stream into my room,      dig up your body, give you mouth to mouth. I sweep your house, crawl into your bed, croon      in your ear. I insist you eat. I will you back with every tooth and…

Wind Flowers

There were flowers all summer long in my side pasture, anemones’ & poppies, all the largesse of a place tended a while. I buy them when I see them on the street in tin buckets from those rough men, the flower men. There is so much black I hadn’t seen before in their fast bloom,…

March 15, 1979

for M.H.O. That which I should have done I did not do. Here on the porch The beginning of spring Or end of winter Reflects off the screen.                                   I stare at you Who now can barely see Even the light that sparks The tunnels of dust. You are blind, Prideful and sentimental      …

Sleeping Alone

the mind opens like milk     the old bottles cream balanced on top     paper caps snapped perfectly into glass rims                  tilts deeper to watch the dividing line stretch out     union of ecru and bluewhite      drop by drop     remembers light glazing the bottle’s neck a woman’s shoulder            learning to pour dream into a pitcher     to drink from a cup…