Poetry

Last summer, composer Ben Yarmolinsky, whom I had never met, called me with the idea of my writing a libretto about the eleven o'clock news, called NewsSongs, commissioned by American Opera Projects. After we agreed on a basic structure, I proceeded to write the text, then-titled Blind Witness NewsSpiel, which is printed here. It differs…

The libretto of The Singers of Lesbos, a two-act opera set in 590 B.C., is very much a work-in-progress, because the composer is still to be chosen. Although I expect to change the libretto in various ways to suit my composer, the set poetic pieces reproduced here should stay much the same. They comprise two…

Pappy died, I flew home, sat on the same old couch holding my mother's head to my breast, the skull for later beneath the frizzy perm: haunch of a starving lamb. No hole, no stone: smoke, a few words for the assembled testimonial few, too much bourbon not enough dry turkey then backwards in the…

When the Peep-O-Day Boys were laying fire down in the hay-ricks and seed-barns of their Catholic neighbours, the art of portrait-painting reached its height across the water. The fire caught. The flames cracked and the light showed up the scaffold and the wind carried staves of a ballad, the flesh-smell of hatred. And she climbed…

One morning in late January 1990 I realized I had never written an out-and-out valentine. I also kept regretting I'd never written a valentine for Raymond Carver. What kind of poet and lover was I, anyway, I was feeling. It's true I'd tried to live my valentine, but still—no valentines. Was it my working-class avoidance…

This happened just once. Desire had stopped at some remote crossroads. I don't know whose heart just stood there without an owner. It was one of those little folds in time when the absurd moon could rise without a purpose. We all knew where melancholy could lurk in ravines, or even lie sprawled out by…

     These notebook entries come from my most recent volume of Fragments, a series of spiral-bound commonplace books I've been keeping for (and to) myself since 1950. These twenty-eight entries (of the three-hundred-some written in 1987) come from typically various sectors of my interests at the time. I selected these present entries in the sequence they…

Today my love feels Italian, reminiscent of, blood spilled between the Austrian and Franco-Sardinian armies at Magenta, bluer and deeper than Harvard crimson. Captain Caprilli is yet to be born to instruct the cavalry. The rider is still an encumbrance to the horse. I drink espresso in the little café with its back to the…

Between two worlds life hovers like a star. —Byron for Tomaz It is not so easy to live on the earth as an angel, to imitate the insects that dance around the moon, to return what air we borrow every few seconds. I am going to enter the hour when wind dreamt of a light…