Poetry

Roblinus is our leading lit- erary pot-shotter (iconoclasm detoxifies a culture and Rob- linus is already a cultural monument) since he is virtuous the pot he shoots can hardly be grass so let us say that the shot must come from a pot which is used to relieve his (distress).

On one side a picture: tears boiling out of eyes that reflect flames. And a caption: “The frontier of the damned.” On the other side a note: “Thanks for the funeral. I’ve just arrived. Isn’t this beautiful? But it hurts. Write.”

Ron’s eager chainsaw and the firs falling combined their uproar with such startling silences there was no sense pretending to work at my desk. Granting the need, but unwilling to watch, I freed up all six culverts instead, clogged since spring when last the road was scraped— one of them so buried I had to…

after Hardy Why would she come to him, come to him, in such disguise to look again at him— look again— with vacant eyes— and why the pain still, the pain— still useless to them— as if to begin again— again begin— what had never been? *     *      * Why be persistently hurtful— no truth to…

lights in the twilight, lights of Solvay over the expanse of frozen snow-covered      lake, orange lights of the refineries, yellow and green and red lights of the neon along the      strip, lights as if undersea, the argon just coming to exist, all lights in the cold moisture of the grounded wind staggering across the lake…

Lily’s marking stock in the back where Walter sweeps and bets and makes boxes out of cardboard. Rose at the cash dreams Cracow. She’s got numbers on her arm. Eleanor threatens to call the union if my father calls her fat once more.           She’s fat. The code for thieves is nineteen; when Pauline shouts nineteen…

He is thinking of everyone he ever knew in no order, lets them come or go as they will. He wonders if he’ll see them again, if they’ll remember him, what they’ll do. There’s no surprise now, not the unexpected as it had been. He’s agreed to being more settled. Yet, like they say, as…

It is not music, though one has tried music. It is not nature, though one has tried The rose, the bluebird, and the bear. It is not death, though one has often died. None of these things is there. In the everywhere that is nowhere Neither the inside nor the outside Neither east nor west…

I am driftwood on his beach, without an Uncle or a radio. I used to be a Spanish ship. Thinking of Seville, mahogany, he picks me up feeling both superior and sorry. *     *      * Or I am brave and he is smaller than the smallest thing he can remember. They had him sit for hours…