In his lifetime Virgil became familiar as anyone with the history of dreams, saw in his palms an old man dreaming as he held them before his face and died. As he became one of the aged dead who sing in our sleep. "There was a man one time," Abigail would say, when Virgil was…
Because the top line hurts, flashes garish red glints off galactic petards, it is the night sky. The cupola-shadowed building whose one lit window this midnight is, for instance, the editor’s open office window, could be any government building or whorehouse that from another neighborhood slices your life. The office wall is the office wall…
Leaving a taxi at Victoria I saw my own face sharp focused and smaller watching me from a puddle or something I held—your face on my copy of your Collected Stories— seamed with dread and smiling. . . old short-haired poet of the first Depression— now back in currency. My thinking is talking to you—…
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…
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