1. Pity the bathtub that belongs to the queen its feet Are bronze casts of the former queen’s feet its sheen A sign of fretting is that an inferior stone shows through Where the marble is worn away with industrious Polishing the tub does not take long it is tiny …
This is a biography of your lungs & their wet battle against oxygen how they root through your chest like vines among the hackberry. Built of birds nests, thin tangles of copper wiring: better off in your skete, better before Aristotle said man is a political animal. Better built from …
For Fabbio Doplicher We were supposed to do a job in Italy and, full of our feeling for ourselves (our sense of being Poets from America) we went from Rome to Fano, met the Mayor, mulled a couple matters over. The Italian literati seemed bewildered by the language of America: …
You can’t say it that way any more. Bothered about beauty you have to Come out into the open, into a clearing, And rest. Certainly whatever funny happens to you Is OK. To demand more than this would be strange Of you, you who have so many lovers, People who …
When my love swears that she is made of truth I do believe her, though I know she lies, That she might think me some untutor’d youth, Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties. Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young, Although she knows my days are past the best, …
He never felt twice the same about the flecked river, Which kept flowing and never the same way twice, flowing Through many places, as if it stood still in one, Fixed like a lake on which the wild ducks fluttered, Ruffling its common reflections, thought-like Monadnocks. There seemed to be …
Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake and dress them in warm clothes again. How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running until they forgot they are horses. It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end …
If you were exchanged in the cradle and your real mother died without ever telling the story then no one knows your name, and somewhere in the world your father is lost and needs you but you are far away. He can never find how true you are, how ready. …
I will tell you what he told me in the years just after the war as we then called the second world war don’t lose your arrogance yet he said you can do that when you’re older lose it too soon and you may merely replace it with vanity just …
Sometimes the notes are ferocious, skirmishes against the author raging along the borders of every page in tiny black script. If I could just get my hands on you, Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien, they seem to say, I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. …