The beginning was the dream, and the voice was a turban gourd. A strum. What are we hiding? Our new bodies born underground with pearls of old corn? Our dry husks on the winter-hard ground/ where is the moment between wet rotting and ashy…
”It comes back to me.” We say that about remembering, as if from longer ago than we knew we had touch with, from before we were born and in someone else’s life, “An apple fell in the night and a wagon stopped.” We were asleep then and heard neither. She herself was asleep. There had…
I am sending my son an emergency survival kit: flares to light up wild mountainous terrain to searches in planes; inscrutably furled space blanket, tested against exposure at Everest by recent explorers; small high-calorie ration to sustain one really strayed to the edge of the world. I include a…
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…
We’ve read much, we’ve forgotten much. Afterward we unlearned all we had learned — what lead and what gold seals — forgeries, counterfeits, rub outs with a razor blade, a penknife, with gum erasers or a fountain pen; and the new script spreading on the parchment, betraying the usurper of others’ perogatives and titles, the…
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