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….
Only a spider, a small missionary of sadness I swallowed somehow when I was distracted. Laughter broke easily her thin restraints, the delicate geometry of the nets but, patient architect, she drew more lines, reinforced the structure until laughter ceased. Only a small spider who came in one day of rain or of sunshine, one…
It’s no use being afraid of snakes. You can walk for days and not see one, Over saddle and switchback Of the tame, toothless Appalachians. Then suddenly he’s there, all there. In a soft, explosion of color His sharp skull flashes out From more permanent, duller Backgrounds of schist and slate. The realest thing for…
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