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…
They leave from positions of strength, like all baroque civilizations; leave the statues we cannot imagine moving for heaviness caught in the skirts. . . We watch their gestures grow finer and more nervous in the widening air. They are the best judges of wine; talk always at the glittering edges of things, the terrible…
for Helen Corsa All that is lost is the body and the object of desire. Approaching composition, the laureate said and resaid his name like the clack of British Railways: Tennyson, Tennyson-Tennyson, murmuring of innumerable be‘s—mere being, humiliating history. Heinreich Schliemann, final hero of Troy, once saw as a child a tombstone: “Here Lies Heinreich…
are used to mount hinges on doors alongside the melon ball scoop hard-boiled egg slicer jodhpurs, corn-skewers tuning fork, grapefruit knife kaopectate nut pick they wait for their single summons practising saying “coming!” as a matter of fact, consider grinding stones washboards napkin rings who may never again be called those with particular adaptations Latin…
Here there is violence: she waits on simple blue not innocent, not unaware, sprawled, random, nude. The ambiguities of her air all gathered in and pent emerge as rose and scarlet. Rage takes its attitude.
My daughter tells me her dream, where she saw The Times on the porch in the morning and knew from the page-sized black of the headlines—WAR— DECLARES WAR—that now it was over, and wept in her dream to think that she’d never have her years, friends, a marriage night, shifting the dreck of everyday life….
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