Afterward, it sent me back to that passage in Chaucer about the birds that slepen al the nyght with open ye, and pretty soon that made me think of another passage, in Coleridge, about nightingales perched giddily on blossomy twigs, their eyes both bright and full. It wasn't long, though, before I thought of a…
to Peter Vansittart The last war-horse slaughtered and eaten long ago. Not a rat, not a crow-crumb left; the polluted water scarce; the vile flies settling on the famous enlarged eyes of skeleton children. Tonight the moon's open-mouthed. I must surrender in the morning. But those cipher tribes out there, those Golden Hordes, those shit!…
Just finished reading Matthews’ Blues If You Want. And Carruth's essay on Thoreau, where he gives a good, swift kick to all that rich-boy mystical-Utopian stuff. Yesterday, I took a break, and in the 90-degree afternoon heat, with a good wind blowing and a cold Miller's sweating on a stump, sawed down the two small…
This time, Death is rising, waving its big bird wing, anthracite plume, smoke and smudge of a twilit sky E. A. Poe would have delighted in. Along the river lights spread, bridges sway into brilliance, it's all so sudden, like coming out of anesthesia, gates opening, ascent and arrival, the elevator lifting suavely into consciousness….
No word I huffed when Stradling urged the squire to throw my eulogy on the fire. The fiddlers laughed. I, snow-silent, proud, did not melt. But I'm spitless now, my pearl, my buttercup, my bread-fruit. I rattle their silver in my pocket. I have other stanzas for harp and lute, other gullible lords to flatter….
In my most recent book, City Life, I used interlocking dramatic monologues to develop a plot and subplot. Finishing it gave me the impetus to experiment with shaping a musical structure out of inter- locking sequences, each sequence resonating with the others. To the Storm's End is one of the sequences I'm working on in…
Lying impatient for the burning copper thread I wake next to me on the too narrow for two bedcage. One of me his eyes squinched ankles crossed I do not wake him he is scrawled with tubes. One of me (me) a mess of broken glass circuitry sheet metal plastic a fist-sized magnet. Hungry this…
Where did she come from, that dig in the ribs? Who is she to pretend she's me and to take on that ditched-in, hopeless tone? Who is this phony yokel? This two-dollar bill, this pig knuckle? Honey, I tell her, my name is Lynn Collins Emanuel, someone whose whole manner says, I'm over-educated but recovering….
The brighter the white veil the more daring the modesty. The yellower the dandelion the more rampant the growth, the health careening toward unveiling. The louder the wheels the deeper the plough sinks in the black field. The darker the soil, the more water it holds and the deeper the plough, the louder the clank…
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