You have to stop thinking of the 4th of July As a time to bang pots in the back yard And watch for rockets. You can’t expect The food just to be handed to you Hot off the charcoal. You have to stand and talk Through the rippling air to the host with the fork…
I don’t know. They are young, their souls are undeveloped. My own soul is no bigger than a thumbnail, my own soul at 42 is a half-moon on a thumbnail for one of those towns that fit in a crystal globe where anybody can shake down snow. There’s an opening for God in those towns….
It tries to come out of the paper and tear at me With its spider hands and its feet like rakes And its eyes like red targets and its green hair in flames And something else blue and sun-like with rays that Rebecca says Is a vagina. Annie With the Blue Vagina. Though when my…
What whiteness will you add to this whiteness, what candor? We walk the dirt road toward town through the clear evening. The sky is apricot behind the black cane. Pink above, and dull raspberry on the Turkish hills across the water. The Aegean is light by the shore, then dark farther out. I cannot distinguish…
While history is unforgiven . . . Delmore Schwartz Daughter stands with her hands in her furs. She has told Dad about her nude modelling, has the check to cash. Dad himself has seen naked women standing as if their lovers’ paws had just left their hips, caressing them to their smoothness. He’s seen them…
On the table landscape of my desolate kitchen in the middle of Ireland in the bleary damp of spring— butter rises like a greasy fort from a saffron yellow saucer. A washcloth, pale yellow is folded as a miniature tent over the toys the children ranged, militia-like around their breakfast. Doorways in Fitzwilliam Square bear…
I had been thinking about love, how hard It is to remember How to fall in love, How love has the frankness Of giving in and the firmness Of logic, and yet when I tried To discover this order I noticed, far down on the beach, The swimmers testing The water, which must have been…
Though you’re an old woman, I mean dead, I make plans to save you: arrange your voice to stream into my room, dig up your body, give you mouth to mouth. I sweep your house, crawl into your bed, croon in your ear. I insist you eat. I will you back with every tooth and…
There were flowers all summer long in my side pasture, anemones’ & poppies, all the largesse of a place tended a while. I buy them when I see them on the street in tin buckets from those rough men, the flower men. There is so much black I hadn’t seen before in their fast bloom,…
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