for Father 1979 Don’t look at his hands now. Stiff and swollen, small finger curled in like a hermit: needing someone to open the ketchup, an hour to shave. That hand held the mallet, made the marble say Cicero, Juno, and laurel. Don’t think of his eyes behind thick lenses squinting at headlines, his breath…
in January 1980 MH: When I first heard that you were putting together a long poem called "An Explanation of America," it crossed my mind that this must be a rather arrogant enterprise. But with that title, and the poem's length, and the titles of the three main sections ("Its Many Fragments," "Its Great Emptiness,"…
I have banked the fires of my body into a small but steady blaze, here in the kitchen where the dough has a life of its own, breathing under its damp cloth like a sleeping child; where the real child plays under the table, pretending the tablecloth is a tent, practicing departures; where a dim…
The eye of the stove is as red as the sun sunk to the frigid ground. An efficient sky wastes no time turning pink; the Dog Star scratches through the cobalt of near-dark. I stare at the slim silhouettes of trees pawed by the wind, & the house rocks, dizzy as the deck of a…
Between the hand in the child’s trouser pocket And his face tilted toward the sky, blank as the sky, The man could see a question forming. Small White clouds hung above the irregular Chimneys the length of the avenue. The sidewalk Was empty, except for a woman at the bus-stop Rhythmically slapping a newspaper against…
MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue Gail Mazur CONTRIBUTORS JUDITH BAUMEL has poems published or forthcoming in The New Republic, Mademoiselle, The Nation, and The Paris Review. She teaches English at Boston University. MARIANNE BORUCH is living and teaching in Taiwan. She has poems forthcoming in The Iowa Review and…
I sit in my stockyard of a room: a whole trainload of footwear, a desk of paper innuendos, correspondence with the invalids. . . . Dear Sympathy, One leg, an entire memory bank forgotten, where have you flown? Better to float on a raft out to sea: there’s the great ocean to swallow me up,…
More and more I think about you, and the others — your likes and unlikes — who chose to harden their difference until it was so dense, it would shine of itself in the dark; lived narrow into towers, to the faces of wives and children loved more steadily than most; turned their even-planed desks…
Love, the flower bed we tended Has grown into a congregation Of tufted old men and arthritic women, The men’s beards scattered by evening winds, The red and yellow dresses of the women Disintegrating Into the earth. And though we were gentle and steady, We called attention to ourselves In every corner of the world….
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