Poetry

The big gray box of Paris like an expensive giftpackage for an invalid stood round me tall as a queen’s effigy in blackened stone. Spring was being kept indoors; each salon a tiny court where winter flowers ruled; where fine lawn curtains kept the public out. Phrases from novels stood in shadows behind buildings —…

the Nigerian gods were cooks. They made the babies for the people, each baby carefully shaped, slant of the eyes tone of voice the way the legs would leap and climb sparse hills. Each time the gods cooked a batch of babies enemy gods blew up a storm whipping the treetops where the babies cradled…

That winking, glimmering like the wings      of starlings in their dark flock, wheeling            into the last light, into the light breeze; that shivering like lake ripples, like sequins      on a black lace veil that half reveals            some face which, loveliest, lies beneath; that soft shade we once sat to read in      afternoons, and…

A month gone by, and days like clouds form above the sea. A man I met smiled at me from a chair, took my hand, talked to me simply. When I turn in the warm bed windowpanes, rain light, and the garden whiten under the moon. Memory colors me like a flush. I lie on…

“More delicate than the historians’ are the map- makers’ colors.” —Elizabeth Bishop “We were crazy, me and Red, Used to take rifles to the fields and shoot at animals, Squirrels and rabbits mostly. My old mother was sure we’d kill somebody — “My father was the only doctor In the whole place, for hundreds of…

Three years ago, one last time, you forgot Yourself and let your hand, all gentleness, Reach to my hair, slipping down to caress My cheek, my neck. My breath failed me; I thought It might all come back yet, believed you might Turn back. You turned, then, once more to your own Talk with that…

“Pelly found a narwhal tooth washed up to shore. With his friend Sheppard, they were going to try sell it at a Hudson Bay Co. store.”      How much? “Maybe two hundred, maybe three. Anyway they set out. Soon a third man appears in the distance. He walks toward them. Pelly says, `He wants something.’ Sheppard…

My cousin Annie who adored the internal combustion engine slapped four-barrel carbs on her sea-green ’55 DeSoto and outdragged every leather boy in town. As soon as winter left for good she stripped to the waist to polish every inch of chrome until the sweat raced down her small important breasts and glittered like the…

1. Hearing of Your Illness I went out from the news of your illness like a broken bone. I spoke your name to the sickle moon and saw her white wing fall back toward the blackness, but she rowed deep past that hesitation, and kept rising. Then I went down to a black creek and…