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  • To Create What?

    Something small, like a new grassblade, or a word like love with the lies taken out of it, or a key that would unlock the doors I myself made. No hurricane, no revolution. Not even a small room where a sane scientist broods on the insanity he created. Something small, like a gesture as marvellous…

  • Elizabeth Bishop

    A memorial tribute read at the American Academy of Arts & Letters, 7 December 1979 My wife and I first met Elizabeth Bishop at the Eberharts' apartment in Cambridge, more than thirty years ago. She had just recently published her first book, North & South, which the reviewers had admired but which had also had…

  • Blue Spill

    He’s been wading deeper into the accident area where he’s the fatherless son and the sonless father. He walks on through the valley and over the mountains, some still virgin, with the same concentration, heart, he has benefited from this spill. He is now betrothed to blue, at home with her wisdom of refracted light,…

  • Springtide

    As time and time when I am broken I think of you, when young, there fills the unintelligible ocean with flood tide and a thousand sails. The shore of trouble is then hidden, the wrack of each sorrow and each reef, and round my feet there is the silken rubbing of an unbroken grief. Why…

  • Five Years Old

    Stars fell all night. The iceman had been very generous that day with his chips and slivers. And I had buried my pouch of jewels inside a stone casket under the porch, their beauty saved for another world. And then my sister came home and I threw a dart through her cheek and cried all…

  • The Bat

    I was reading about rationalism, the kind of thing we do up north in early winter, where the sun leaves work for the day at 4:15. Maybe the world is intelligible to the rational mind; and maybe we light the lamps at dusk for nothing. . . . Then I heard wings overhead. The cats…

  • The Wild Cheese

    A head of cheese raised by wolves or mushrooms recently rolled into the village, it could neither talk nor walk upright. Small snarling boys ran circles around it; and just as they began throwing stones, the Mayor appeared and dispersed them. He took the poor ignorant head of cheese home, and his wife scrubbed it…