Swifts or barn swallows — No matter which, Well named, Swoop down like angry bees All about my head. Like little whistling darts they are, Shot by some vengeful spirit From up in the barn loft. So many questions aimed at me. What do they want of a poor old soul, Slow witted, unswift of…
translated by Michael Steinberg It is stirring to observe how civilisation ever enlarges its dominion, how even from races otherwise untouched by higher education, talent emerges to hoist itself to remarkable heights. At the house of Privy Councillor of Commerce R., I made the acquaintance of a young man who unites to extraordinary gifts an…
Of course the family’d call him Todd, the tie to someone’s maiden life and short, masculine. And of course he’d be blond, fragile in his Confederate uniform. Todd Carter, over the mantel, age twenty-five. Came riding up in the Battle of Franklin, one hundred feet from his own front door to six bullets. They dragged…
(for Peter Taylor) The sad, because unspeaking, smiles overbrimming among too many people known too slightly but halfway loved, in large rooms where the light shades and flickers on the untended gardens, vines and harpstrings, of the old wallpaper . . . Whom do we speak to when we speak on these stages we make…
Dear Bob: Thanks for your typical douche letter. Since Xmas I haven’t been doing much. I can say that I’m not watching TV all day, or smoking pot. I read Books, write letters, learn Swahili, —Smoke pot—, look for jobs, which Includes travelling and throwing my knife. I’m getting pretty good at it. I can,…
From the house, it was the spread-out apron, a flat theatre of loose-strife & thistle, rimmed with pines that caught the sun on the tops after four o’clock. We never should have bought the house, it was too much, the land, the view, the May grass we sat down upon to compute interest, taxes &…
I. It was the first time a really sumptuous girl had taken his hand, and Rome lay before them: the Spanish Steps’ Cinderella night-piece, dream-whitecaps falling/rising to Bernini’s drowning, monstrous boat . . . They left behind his more glamorous, her more dowdy, …
Glasses drained, Cigars smoked to their bands, Conversation. Deep looks. Smiles. Night lurches, repeats itself, Sees double in our little Glassed-in terrace-garden. Winds down, as fog calms the city Spun from the blue smoke Running Circles around us. Speakers lost in foliage Direct cooling airs— Stately, bright, insouciant— Conditioned as we are To the little…
First it was only the winter trees— their boughs eloquent at midnight with small but mortal explosions, and always a humming under the lashings of storm. Nights I sat at the kitchen door listening out into the darkness until finally spring came, and everything transcended. As one by one the ponds opened, took the white…
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