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In the Ward

Ten years older in an hour— I see your face smile, your mouth is stepped on without bruising. You are very frightened by the ward, your companions were chosen for age; you are the youngest and sham-flirt with the nurse— your chief thought is scheming the elaborate surprise of your escape. Being old in good…

Ellen West

I love sweets,—            heaven would be dying on a bed of vanilla ice cream . . . But my true self is thin, all profile and effortless gestures, the sort of blond elegant girl whose                  body is the image of her soul. —My doctors tell me I must give up this ideal;…

Saint Peter and the Monk

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…

Our Afterlife

(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 Vineland Lullaby

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…

Explication

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…

Our Afterlife 2

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—…