(i) I measure ways out of here. Scan a room, Memorize each exit sign. count the stairs. It's easy to blame the dark, the infinite For what hasn't happened yet. I know all the names Of the highways, the exact wrenchings of elevators, Their clutch: every night I have had to lie a little more…
i am taking in taking in like a lump of a dead baby on the floor mama kicks me i don't feel anything * * * i am taking in taking in i am reading newspapers i am seeing films i am reading poetry i am listening to psychiatrists, friends someone knows the way someone will…
I There's a sky with nothing in it— No parachute, as if to save you, Has buckled from the empty ceiling: Your nieces must be taken to the zoo; Their voices are squeaky like vermilion cellophane. The hill to the antelopes you storm, but their shoes Are wrong for such an outing: the straps will…
James Arthur Baldwin 1924-1987 Hungers of the flesh, the timeless terror of our need, the barter of our liberty for lies, these were your watchwords and your witness, the steel of your surrender to our song: True believer, I want to cross over into camp ground. One fiery still November, not in Harlem, nor Paris,…
Now I'm Rembrandt's age when he died. For years I've been tracking his self-portraits in the museums of Europe and America, watching the bright eyes of his twenties gradually sadden into old age. In those last portraits he seems to be saying, “I have seen enough, lost enough, died enough.” But when I look at…
You are right, but your patch isn't big enough. —Jesse Jackson When a cure is found and the last panel is sewn into place, the Quilt will be displayed in a permanent home as a national monument to the individual, irreplaceable people lost to AIDS—and the people who knew and loved them most. —Cleve Jones,…
I wonder about you: whether the blue abrasions of daylight, falling as dusk across your page make you reach for the lamp. I sometimes think I see that gesture in the way you use language. And whether you think, as I do, that wild flowers dried and fired on the ironstone rim of the saucer…
Under pressure Mick tells me one of the jokes truckers pass among themselves: Why do women have legs? I can't imagine; the day is too halcyon, beyond the patio too Arizonan blue, sparrows drunk on figs and the season's first corn stacked steaming on the wicker table. . . .I give up; why do they?…
Tom heals best in the dreamless portion where nerves are quiet trees in winter. He opens his eyes in the middle of the night and feels better. He has nothing left: no maps of the way back, no green cry of wild parrots. Morning sleep may carry in its steaming kettle of images—little for the…
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