Poetry

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…

When within the impenetrable green this morning is (thicket, wicker basket), the better to hear shade in shadow, twigs and stabs of light, I shut my eyes: the mockingbird sings in threes, like Dante, ninety-eight rhymes in seventeen cantos; rocks throne to throne, imbibing; wrings out each note, scrubbing on the old washboard, lets the…

The shift from Eugenio Montale's first three books—high modernist poetry, lyrically intense, elaborately wrought, musically intricate, elliptical—to his last four (Satura, the two Diaries of 1971 and 1972, and the Quaderno di quattro anni) for the translator poses obvious problems, above all of tone and continuity. The late poetry, for instance, is no less dense…

Under the lamplight of a Paris hotel, You read Time on “The Decline of America” While your wife watches the evening news,      hoping for comprehension. You remember when you were very poor And made less money than you'll spend on this vacation. You vowed then not to romanticize that time, But your pockets stuffed with…

I must train myself to no longer exist but as a stone lifted and thrown to wherever I land, a new place, a new odor to it and new sound and action surrounding me, all this without the thought of loss, despair, or hope, a preparation for loss. Such a life would be god's, if…