Heat sensors, cameras on automatic pan, vast slabs of prefabricated wall trucked in and joined on site like grandiose dominos. . . . It took the state eight years to plan to keep those men apart from you and me and only sometimes from each other, for even gang rapists and murderers are social animals….
In this field of day lilies just opening, beating for sun in this lush summer bear meadow, I tried to find a way to stay in your world, wife. The field hummed with life, the bugs and frogs and jeering birds but no words came as I had hoped from the sky blue as a…
Some years ago in your infinite European boredom you finally concluded that maybe Indians are really a noble race, yes, somewhat tragic but definitely tied to the earth. So, you decided to become one. Why not? Who would care? And who would know the difference? Your cheekbones were a little high and you were a…
To say that she came into me, from another world, is not true. Nothing comes into the universe and nothing leaves it. My mother—I mean my daughter did not enter me. She began to exist inside me—she appeared within me. And my mother did not enter me. When she lay down, to pray, on me,…
Most of my life I courted simplicity and tried to leash any wind-breaking plagues of rhetoric that swirled in my brain. I prayed for rational segues from word to deed, pain to relief, and madness to sanity with little success so sometimes words surged like mad lemmings to my tongue and I spoke from a…
Then dirt scared me, because of the dirt he had put on her face. And her training bra scared me—the newspapers, morning and evening, kept saying it, training bra, as if the cups of it had been calling the breasts up—he buried her in it, perhaps he had never bothered to take it off. They…
“. . . for it seemed to me that everybody ought to know about it, but I was afraid to tell, because I knew that nobody would believe me . . .” —from Black Elk Speaks It’s a strange night here in West Virginia, warm for November, one last thunderstorm before winter comes on. Rain…
Just over the horizon a great machine of death is roaring and rearing. One can hear it always. Earthquake, starvation, the ever- renewing field of corpse-flesh. In this valley the snow falls silently all day and out our window We see the curtain of it shifting and folding, hiding us away in …
Let us think of God as a lover Who never calls, Whose pleasure in us is aroused In unrepeatable ways, God as body we cannot Separate from desire, Saying to us, “Your love Is only physical.” Let us think of God as a bronze With green skin Or a plane…
Fall 1971 - Digital