Poetry

  • The Man in the Common

    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…

  • On a Name

    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…

  • Michael’s Fete

              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 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….

  • Stanzas from Valéry

    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,…

  • The Sacrifice

    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…

  • Three Novembers

    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…