At the Bus Stop, Eurydice
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.
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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…
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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…
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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—…
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After Visiting a Mental Patient
It is summer and the birds maintain their silence. There is the smell of raspberries that proves to be my birthday, and the gathering of certain dust which I find encouraging, and Jesus Loves Me again and again on a vague piano. This I know. I pass myself the salt.
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Preliminary Pages For A Work of Revenge
The characters in this work are meant to be real. References to persons living and dead are intended. Are there fifteen people in the world who will be afraid when they read this paragraph? No. That, in itself, is a comment on my insignificance. Are there fifteen people who will become uneasy on reading it?…
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4/5/74
The air was soft, the ground still cold. In the dull pasture where I strolled Was something I could not believe. Dead grass appeared to slide and heave, Though still too frozen-flat to stir, And rocks to twitch, and all to blur. What was this rippling of the land? Was matter getting out of hand…
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The New Atlantis
The Feast of St John, Corpus Christi Sunday, Houses breathing warmly out like stacks of hay, Windows wide, the white and yellow Papal flags Now drooped: one side of the street nods at the cool Shadow opposite sloping towards the canal’s Green weed that reflects nothing. Turn a corner, Nettles lap at a high hoarding,…
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Evening on the Cote D’Azur, 1952
When she'd packed up the remains of the picnic lunch and gotten the twins settled in their carriage, Betty Meyers looked around for Bobby, her five-year-old. Squinting against the sun, she finally saw him 'way up the beach, playing with some French kids. "Bobby!" she yelled, but he pretended not to hear and she started…