Poetry

Twist away the gates of steel — Devo O wide blossom-splashed private drives Along which sullen mouthed little guys In motorized surreys Ride shotgun over spectacular philodendra! O paradise of zombies! O terminal antipathy to twist And shout! O hotel sized garages Inside which smoothly tooled imported motors Purr like big pussies under long polished…

Mom says she won’t; we’ll have to clean them, though she used to do it when I fished with dad. Dad’s illness wore her down; I think she felt relief after he died, and didn’t mourn him long enough before she married Sam. I know there is an art to cleaning fish. In ancient times,…

I. Happy we when our footnote tells us “Hercules was a legendary hero of ancient Greece.” I had supposed him Lord of the Admiralty President of IBM the Man Who Made the Bomb latest sensation in the rock constellation a Dior creation a Mafia bum. II. Happy the college kid who can read clonked on…

The quest for winter sunshine washes The gasping survivor up on the shore Much that’s done isn’t meant Much that’s meant isn’t done I take it up & at the beck & call Of some remote agency I stick it in & when it’s over I pull it out again Like the bloody assegai of…

She writes that she has not been well and adds “but this will not be news.” She complains of the rise in the cost of living and notes that Alfred, the parrot, has died. “Or feigns to have.” She is not sure except that the bird has not stirred in a fortnight. “Do parrots hibernate?”…

By the road in the field they stand, lifting branches they cannot remember, rocking shut in the wind. In some other world they grew such trunks and hurled their leaves across the sky. Now, emptyhanded, they wait for the end which has been happening for years. Nodding off beside telephone wires, tethered to farmhouses, the…

Green leaves lit by the sun, the rest deep in shadow . . . a tree is an adequate symbol of inner or spiritual life. (“The natural object,” said E. P., “is always the adequate symbol.”) It wasn’t just characters . . . one heard that successful men, corporation executives, were into transcendental meditation. But…

When they asked me what happened to my wedding portrait, I lied. I said I destroyed it. Instead, I hid it. Hid it and found it and hid it again. They should have known I couldn’t destroy it. I have had to remove the pictures of people from the walls of my room so the…

Oddly, being so large gave them a sense of possibility. Women with huge upper arms felt freer. Children never stopped opening the landscapes of flesh that grew in their hands. The few thin ones were called “chinless” because their long faces seemed indistinguishable from their necks. No one knows when they began to seem beautiful,…