Catullus: Odi et amo
I hate and love. Ignorant fish, who even wants the fly while writhing.
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Memory Biscuit
Everyone’s real world is a memory biscuit lodged somewhere in the spine or the ribs—a question of how one sits, when a strange kid is howling and you’re thinking: now my kid will be interested in the classics. Meanwhile, the biscuit dreams pulp of childhood and lumpy adolescence nudging its way to the table after…
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Enough
I don’t want to shuffle in a Greek theatre chanting powerful platitudes while Nemesis, off stage, gouges and stabs. Or twangle a harp in an Irish castle while the drunken louts, the great heroes, quarrel over chess or lie with a snake-brained woman. I don’t want to be one of those who paused between the…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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Summer 1890: Near the Gulf
The hour was late, and the others were asleep. He struck a match on the wooden railing of the porch, and lit a cigarette. She beheld his head and hand, estranged from the body in wavering light. . . . What she felt then would, like heavy wind and rain, bring any open flower to…
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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…
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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…