I need more time, a simple day in Paris hotels and window shopping. The croissants will not bake themselves and the Tower of London would Like to spend a night in the tropics with gray sassy paint. It has many Wounds and historic serial dreams under contract to Hollywood. Who will play the head of Mary, Queen of Scots, and who will braid her
Hair? Was it she who left her lips on the block for the executioner, Whose hands would never find ablution, who would never touch a woman Again or eat the flesh of a red animal? Blood pudding would repulse him Until joining Anne. That is the way of history written for Marlow and Shakespear. They are with us now that we are sober and wiser,
Not taking the horrors of poetry too seriously. Why am I telling you this Nonsense, when I have never seen you sip your coffee or tea, In the morning? Not to mention,
Slip-pilings on the Brooklyn littoral —the poles still tarry, flimsy; the ferry terminus with its walledup doors wan doorshapes on eroded sills. Downstream, the strutwork of the Williamsburg cable tower threw its cool shadow half a mile inland
One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies On water; it glides So from the walker, it turns Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.
The beautiful changes as a forest is changed By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;
Which represents you, as my bones do, waits, all pores open, for the stun of snow. Which will come, as it always does, between breaths, between nights of no wind and days of the nulled sun. And has to be welcome. All instinct wants to anticipate faceless fields, a white road drawn
Scrambled eggs and whiskey in the false-dawn light. Chicago, a sweet town, bleak, God knows, but sweet. Sometimes. And weren’t we fine tonight? When Hank set up that limping treble roll behind me my horn just growled and I
After the sweet promise, the summer’s mild retreat from mother’s cancer, the winter months of her death, I come to this white office, its sterile sheet, its hard tablet, its stirrups, to hold my breath while I, who must, allow the glove its oily rape, to hear the almost mighty doctor over me equate
9:13 p.m., Lucky Bock in hand, I inscribe: walked the lovely 33 blocks to school today, streets clear and thick melting snow all around. taught my 4 hours of poetry; the afternoon class was hard; kid named Schweikert kept on fucking up. took typed-up poems of yesterday to Platt and put up
By the last few times we saw her it was clear That things were different. When you tried to help her Get out of the car or get from the car to the door Or across the apartment house hall to the elevator There was a new sense of heaviness Or of inertia in the body. It wasn’t That she was less willing to be helped to walk But that the walking itself had become less willing.
Because I to my brethern wrote and to my sisters two: Good sister Anne, you this might wote, if so I should not do To you, or ere I parted hence, You vainly had bestowed expence.
Yet is it not for that I write, for nature did you bind To do me good, and to requite hath nature me inclined: Wherefore good sister take in gree These simple lines that come from me.
Prodigal, what were your wanderings about? The smoke of homecoming, the smoke of departure. The earth grew music and the tubers sprouted to Sesenne's singing, rain-water, fresh patois in a clay carafe, a clear spring in the ferns, and pure things took root like the sweet-potato vine. Over the sea at dusk, an arrowing curlew,
Listen, children: Your father is dead. From his old coats I'll make you little jackets; I'll make you little trousers From his old pants. There'll be in his pockets Things he used to put there,
Womanhood, wanton, ye want: Your meddling, mistress, is mannerless; Plenty of ill, of goodness scant, Ye rail at riot, reckless: To praise your port it is needless; For all your draff yet and your dregs, As well borne as ye full oft time begs.
All middle age invisible to us, all age passed close enough behind to seize our napehairs and whisper in a voice all thatch and smoke some village-elder warning, some rasped-out Remember me . . . Mute and grey in her city uniform (stitch-lettered JUVENILE), the matron just pointed us to our lockers, and went out. ‘What an old bag!’ ‘Got a butt on you, honey?’ ‘Listen,
writings on the wall * I was the one who said the ditch in the backyard was maybe a river that had flowed from somewhere else and was flowing to somewhere else * I was the one who said where are you now?
Comment form: