Poetry

I woke before dawn, still in my body. Water ran down every window, and rushed from the eaves. Beneath the empty feeder a skunk was prowling for suet or seed. The lamps flickered and then came on again. Smoke from the chimney could not rise. It came down into the yard, and brooded there on…

     I The water looked as if it were hanging, waiting under the Congress Street bridge. It was alive with jellyfish, surfacing and settling, their flinch turned flourish joyous—a slow jumping up and down. Moored in the Fort Point Channel, the ship of the Boston Tea Party Museum sat like a big, family dog while children…

Sacrificed, nailed into space once filled with dull, exhausted clothes, no wonder the wood moans like a stricken beast in a dark corner of the room. It is a yearning for foliage, fantasy, the arabesque of branch, Rococo legs that want to sink, to dig deep and become roots while every drawer whispers of the…

And once, for no special reason, I rode in the back of the pickup, leaning against the cab. Everything familiar was receding fast—the mountain, the motel, Huldah Currier’s house, and the two stately maples . . . Mr. Perkins was having a barn sale, and cars from New Jersey and Ohio were parked along the…

The aweful terror of the night. The daylight never dawning. The crows caw cawing. The phoebe’s final sounding. Day is endless. TV whining. Ads of soap. Terrored yawning. The twitching hands. The restless feet. Endless rapping.      Gnashing teeth. Boredom, unforgivable sin, the Holy Ghost bends with      heaviness. Haldowed maze. No diamond clear. No key. No…

Only a spider, a small missionary of sadness I swallowed somehow when I was distracted. Laughter broke easily her thin restraints, the delicate geometry of the nets but, patient architect, she drew more lines, reinforced the structure until laughter ceased. Only a small spider who came in one day of rain or of sunshine, one…

          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,…