An excerpt from the poem (Scripts for the Pageant) which follows “The Book of Ephraim” (in Divine Comedies, 1976) and Mirabell: Books of Number (1978) to conclude a trilogy based upon communications through the Ouija Board. The mediums are JM and David Jackson; the princi- pal speakers, W.H. Auden, Maria Mitsotáki (“Maman”), and the archangel…
I The water looked as if it were hanging, waiting under the Congress Street bridge. It was alive with jellyfish, surfacing and settling, their flinch turned flourish joyous—a slow jumping up and down. Moored in the Fort Point Channel, the ship of the Boston Tea Party Museum sat like a big, family dog while children…
You will find the laboratory far simpler these days; uncluttered. The cauldron is gone, the endless bubbling, the stench, the maze of pipes, the shelves of exotic ingredients that, however combined, could not transmute baseness into gold. That is all done with. Sold or given away to whoever would have it. The thin blue flame…
When Judas writes the history of SOLITUDE,— . . . let him celebrate Miss Mary Kenwood; who, without help, placed her head in a plastic bag, then locked herself in a refrigerator. * * * —Six months earlier, after thirty years teaching piano, she had watched her mother slowly die of throat cancer. Watched her want…
The aweful terror of the night. The daylight never dawning. The crows caw cawing. The phoebe’s final sounding. Day is endless. TV whining. Ads of soap. Terrored yawning. The twitching hands. The restless feet. Endless rapping. Gnashing teeth. Boredom, unforgivable sin, the Holy Ghost bends with heaviness. Haldowed maze. No diamond clear. No key. No…
Sacrificed, nailed into space once filled with dull, exhausted clothes, no wonder the wood moans like a stricken beast in a dark corner of the room. It is a yearning for foliage, fantasy, the arabesque of branch, Rococo legs that want to sink, to dig deep and become roots while every drawer whispers of the…
1. Danny in the Hospital after visiting Danny in the hospital I walk to Chapel Street. The crazy teenagers stand in front of the Mall, in the cold. White girls flirt with the black boys. One girl is fat and has strange speech. The black girls call out something I don’t catch. he has gotten…
Sometime in the early 1960’s, Robert Lowell began to collaborate with Leonard Bernstein on Bernstein’s third symphony, Kaddish. Three poems were written before the collaboration was broken off. Bernstein in the end wrote his own text. Lowell’s three poems are published here for the first time. I Brothers, we glory in this blinding hour, our…
I always thought I wanted to be somebody else anyway. There’s no good reason. I walked the same block a hundred times, a hundred times waiting and hoping for a dejavu, a hundred times. There’s no good explanation—like the time Susan told me she was pregnant and her baby was going to be half black….
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