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And once, for no special reason, I rode in the back of the pickup, leaning against the cab. Everything familiar was receding fast—the mountain, the motel, Huldah Currier’s house, and the two stately maples . . . Mr. Perkins was having a barn sale, and cars from New Jersey and Ohio were parked along the…

Driving through Cambridge, leaving work, in a hurry, snow slurring my windshield, I see an old balloon-fin Pontiac, orange, with a chrome outline that drags me back to Miss Quinn’s 1st grade. From the classroom, the WPA-orange brick schoolhouse & housing project stood eyeball to eyeball. The Irish spinsters, with their orange hair, led foreign-smelling…

In mirrors all I see Is my own reflection My table is not a horse Onions are something I eat There is no forest In my cupped palm The sun does not set Past the ridge of my fingers Doors only lead me into The next room When I shut my eyes Blackness surrounds me…

          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…