In the exaggeration of distance between the hotel chapel and the body poised a foot beneath the ceiling’s dust, an incorruptible levitation, an axe in the public air pointing away from the knife’s hilt over the heart. Murder, from the alluvial elbow to the diagonal breviary. For us, a perfect focus unaware of conspiracy, distracted…
(For Peter Taylor) Southcall— a couple in passage, two Tennessee cardinals in green December outside the window dart and tag and mate— young as they want to be. We’re not. Since my second fatherhood and stay in England, I am a generation older. We are dangerously happy— our book-bled faces streak like red birds, dart…
The old lady’s face. Who knows whose it was? The bus slid by me. Who in the world knows me? She was amazed, amazed. Can death really take me? The bus went away. It took the old lady away.
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…
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