Having walked out in the storm and seen no end to it and nowhere to get to you watch the snow cover the ground cover itself cover everything that is not you it is a blinding fall from moment into moment the air sweeping away the air the cold turning your breath to stone no…
It was gray; the air was just cool; the sky hung above me like the inside of a skull. It was easy to walk down that street. Before I thought, I had entered the brain of all the strangers but it had relaxed, it was not like noon with differences glaring in the sun. I…
Charles Simic, whose most easily available collections of poems are Dismantling the Silence (Braziller, 1971) and Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk (Braziller, 1974), spoke on a Friday afternoon in March, 1975 with George Starbuck in a New Hampshire kitchen. Much of the conversation centered on another book, White, (New Rivers…
1. Our Inhaler At first I was suspicious, when in the heat of our getting into each other you would call for “Amy.” I wondered who it was you wanted, me or her. But when you kept coming back for both of us, I realized that losing you to her was also a way of…
A Letter to 102 Boulevard Haussmann Mon cher maître, could even you have mastered such dissemblance? Given your gift for luring the accidental and the inevitable to lie down together, what would you have done with these disparities—could you have parsed them into a semblance of sense? Mind, that phoenix, Kindles its…
A girl pushes a bicycle through tall grass, through overturned garden furniture, water rising to her ankles. Cups without handles sail upon the murky water, saucers with fine cracks in the procelain. At the upstairs window, behind damask curtains, the steward’s pale blue eyes follow. He tries to call; shreds of yellow note paper float…
"Chris? Is Wystan somewhere about?" I am twenty-two years old and never in the realm of fact or fancy have I heard five words more difficult to "take in." The cherub at the top of the stairs who has just uttered them turns away. His voice resounds in distant murmurs through the length of the…
I saw you on my way from shoes to sweaters coming down the other escalator in the gray suit we had bought together in Venice. It had been years, but its cut was still stylish; and your hair shone with the same ebony luster it had that summer. You didn’t see me, though I waved,…
General Slaughter declared that on the night after the terrific repulse of Burnside’s army at Fredericksburg, Stonewall Jackson had made the following suggestion: — “I am of the opinion that we ought to attack the enemy at once; And in order to avoid the confusion and mistakes so common in a night attack, I recommend…
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