for Dee Dog, Dreaming There is always something; and past that something Something else: Jarrell’s words lingering as late in our house the wild skid of a car overrides the night’s news, snow icing blind the world. I nod from room to room, remembering all these somethings come to nothing. I come to you in…
"Kees was a very good poet." "He is an important poet, among the three or four best of his generation." "Within its definitions this is poetry of a major order." "If the air were not so empurpled with bids for the bardic chair, we might hear his voice more clearly." Those who have had the…
Composed of air, and thus always composed in silence, sharing the sun’s color, jointweed, poverty grass, british soldiers, do not bend as the wind passes nor breathe with more garrulous greenery. Inland from the salt wash, they wear the shifty winter out with waiting, and summer too, tight-lipped as stone, neither reckless in growth nor…
Everything stops. A fat man on his way to Baltimore smokes for three hours in the club car. The porter slips out and calls his wife, he has one dime left and he’s almost yelling. Somewhere south of York, she thinks he said. The funeral procession leaves its lights on and out of this pure…
For someone like myself, who writes in a language she was not born into, the second language assumes and retains a special fascination. We absorb our first language long before we speak it, and we learn to speak it fluently without ever becoming conscious of the learning process. The second language – in my case…
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…
It is before an undeclared war. She is full of feeling, yet abstracted; she must tend to details: see that the church is ready, the rings present, her sister’s dress, a pale green, is the right shade of dress that will not war with her mother’s. A floating homunculus is present in her body, but…
Consciousness and Community in Adrienne Rich's The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977 Adrienne Rich has explored the relationship of personal and political consciousness in her poetry for the past 25 years. She has achieved a new synthesis of private and public experience in her most recent work, The Dream of a Common Language:…
When the black snake flashed onto the morning road, and the truck could not swerve— death, that is how it happens. Now he lies looped and useless as an old bicycle tire. I stop the car and carry him into the bushes. He is as cool and gleaming as a braided whip, he is as…
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