When I wake up, it’s noon and the game is already over. The dusky city is full of people out of their minds with disappointment, fat people eating cigars, thin people whose only remaining ambition is to gain weight, or die. Inside the stadium fans are still attacking the goal-posts like antibodies. Curious, I take…
Even a Pyrrhonist Who knows only that he can never know (But adores a paradox) Would admit it’s getting dark. Pale as a wrist- Watch numeral glow, Fireflies build a sky among the phlox, Imparting their faint light Conservatively only to themselves. Earthmurk and flowerscent Sweeten the homes of ants. Comes on the night When…
The leap from three adjectives to an object is impossible. The change was laughable though surprising in the 24 years between my first and second visit to you in Washington— the first rung of the ladder, the sharpest pencil line, far from my ABC’s at Potomic School, Miss Locke and Miss Gay. My arms reached…
I suppose it started with the terrible dream about airlines. When I tried to write about it the typewriter chewed through the paper, edged away from me across the table, and proceeded to issue terse, impertinent messages. It was like the beginning of Attack of the Mushroom People, when a strange fungus-like growth spelled disaster…
We were trudging along the dry road toward the dunes and I was telling Octavio Paz about DeWitt Henry's issue of Ploughshares (2/2) devoted to realist fiction. "Realist fiction!" His eyebrows arched in mock surprise. "This is a logical contradiction, no?" * * * If Ploughshares has, as we like to hope, come of age, it…
Who was Athena’s pet— Be glad you’re dead. That you should see the shadow fleshen! The shade caught in the arachnid net— This dust was Randall and they say That almost on his lucky day He found his only luck to be The dark concrete of 53 I was Athena’s pet. . . . Send…
For me it might be fine to wake up and weed the garden play tennis or lift a chair over my head but what about the man who moves pianos for a living or the woman who at last gives birth to one too many children what does she think of breakfast brought to her…
EDITORIAL BOARD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor David Gullette Associate Editors Norman Klein Lloyd Schwartz George Starbuck Contributing Editors Fanny Howe Robert Pinsky James Randall Jane Shore Ellen Wilbur CONTRIBUTORS JONATHAN AARON has had poems in The New Yorker, American Review, Esquire, Kayak, etc. He teaches at Williams and will enjoy an Amy…
(The Ribbon to Norwood, January 5, 1971) Will all be well? To outfly the snow. Waking in the dark . . . . He kneels at the hearth, Radiates the ceiling . . . . No. Older than that. Old. My father lights no fires; I expect no hearth. But today I go, My day…
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