Poetry

I have this witch’s dream sitting in a wicker chair in a green garden our friends are sitting there I have on a satin purple slip I love the way it feels on my bare hot skin and god am I even in my inner ear the small of my back      don’t tell me I…

The day lets go its frozen pose of blue and grey. Snow falls, white on white, wrapping the town in its cocoon. Such calm in snow. The air no longer hungers for each step. My puffs of breath lead me to the Common, its web of stone paths just covered. I scan the scene. No…

Why does a girl love a girl? Why do you still have messages for me? Descending the stairs in the tubercular house every Easter morn      Melanie would come upon a group of Quaker women they glided over in drabs and whispered things to her alone in her father’s barn she would tell me this while…

          An excerpt from the poem (Scripts for the Pageant)      which follows “The Book of Ephraim” (in Divine Comedies,      1976) and Mirabell: Books of Number (1978) to conclude a      trilogy based upon communications through the Ouija      Board. The mediums are JM and David Jackson; the princi-      pal speakers, W.H. Auden, Maria Mitsotáki (“Maman”),      and the archangel…

I always thought I wanted to be somebody else anyway.      There’s no good reason. I walked the same block a hundred times, a hundred times waiting and hoping for a dejavu, a hundred times. There’s no good explanation—like the time Susan told me she was pregnant and her baby was going to be half black….

Gaunt Immortality, in your golds and blacks, Consoler hideously laureled, who makes Death into a maternal bosom, loving— Pious device and ruse; marvelous lie! Who does not know, and who does not deny That skull’s infinite hollow, vacant and laughing. Deep fathers, heads untenanted and full, Who under the weight of so much spaded soil,…

When Judas writes the history of SOLITUDE,— . . . let him celebrate Miss Mary Kenwood; who, without help, placed her head in a plastic bag, then locked herself in a refrigerator. *     *      * —Six months earlier, after thirty years teaching piano, she had watched her mother slowly die of throat cancer. Watched her want…

I stood in front of City Lights the other afternoon. Allen Ginsberg had just dropped off a manuscript called “Howl.” Lawrence let me read it. I thought it was quite good. Bob Kaufman tried to punch me, but I don’t think he particularly disliked the manuscript. Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady drove up. Neal was…

1. Danny in the Hospital after visiting Danny in the hospital I walk to Chapel Street. The crazy teenagers stand in front of the Mall, in the cold. White girls flirt with the black boys. One girl is fat and has strange speech. The black girls call out something I don’t catch. he has gotten…