Poetry

The machines were vacant. Was a trumpet beginning a single slow turn? How could the storm frame itself? Find the space between any two stones And measure your travels from that distance. The inside is too fast to stand against And not, move, you will not. Nothing more narrow. We were not told until after…

Trains in the night. In the morning waves reach beyond water. Animal faces appear at the window muttering cries from the pen. Fences fastened in dirt topple over. Unafraid the woman walks away from the man she loves, the man who does not love her. She is surprised at her own bravery, decides over and…

An accidental landscape could Close down the approach Sketched in glass, aureate Gravings of soft tropical Foliage, produce heaped on The dock, these islands Are slow. Pale oaken oars Pull each wave apart. A various harbor goes Out draped by narrows.

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,…