Poetry

Self-stranded, in a raw strength Not untested but contained, cornered, He held himself at the poised heat Of that whitening hour when wind stirs, When it licks at his high ledge, laying tribute To the mute opening with a mild motion, Sighing itself through seeds and sweet herbs. For then, as a thirst joined at…

Bassoon and pizzicato, Franz Joseph Haydn’s “Clock”, horses at full run. Adagio; Presto; more an ending to a year than a beginning of a symphony. A flute — the big time piece becomes a tiny musical clock, a gift, a minuet for Prince Esterhazy in 1793. The finale is a double fugue. The first three…

It didn’t seem like history. Seemed, more expediency. . . . I’m walking to the beauty shop. On Rugby Road a fractured fume of sodden leaf and Phi Delts’ pizza lunch, and through the pane one of their rout, white-coated, hands behind, waits unattending in the wings, waits out the weary midday to the robust…

Lily, krinon, Susannah, Out of night’s stemless convolvulus, Lileia, choice stalk and throated petal, Out of smooth sand and night’s choicest iron. Through his stilled arms poured buried rivers, Down the deposits of his legs bored torrents. Over his hands the hours subdivided Like foam, a century’s sped lilies. And though the dark room held…

Susan Sontag is down in New York City tonight writing and she wants to explain something to you. She has it sort of figured out, or part of it, and she would like to set it straight for you. William Gass is out in St. Louis thinking and he has a series of connections between…

Overture. A shutter opens. Down Goes light. The Norfolk Island pine Potted in peatmoss breathes Deeply once; resigns itself on cue. Under the dimming dervish crown Extend now four, no, five fringed limbs (Twelve more hang groundward barely skirting trance) In stills — in stills that — yes! inspired Revolve and quicken. As though fingers…

It was as if he took all his springs and summers, falls and winters, and lived each in one dose. They no longer brought, like salesmen, again and again, their samples of fruit and leaves. They stretched through years. They claimed their territory. He was born into fifteen years of alert cold. Knowing nothing but…

Lordliest maple, of the thick-poured trunk, late, later, latest, still to be treasuring so uncountably many leaves — themselves forgetting themselves in a last firebrand fling earthward, down the leaning helix of a standing breeze; to lie among the eagerer fledglings, earlier dead, daffodil to crimson webfeet imprinted on the icehard mud. Each single leaf…