#AmericanWriters
Compelled by calamity’s magnet They loiter and stare as if the ho… Burnt—out were theirs, or as if th… Some scandal might any minute ooze From a smoke—choked closet into li…
I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it— A sort of walking miracle, my skin Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
Viciousness in the kitchen! The potatoes hiss. It is all Hollywood, windowless, The fluorescent light wincing on a… Coy paper strips for doors
Revolving in oval loops of solar s… Couched in cauls of clay as in hol… Dead men render love and war no he… Lulled in the ample womb of the fu… No spiritual Caesars are these de…
It is no night to drown in: A full moon, river lapsing Black beneath bland mirror—sheen, The blue water—mists dropping Scrim after scrim like fishnets
Love set you going like a fat gold… The midwife slapped your footsoles… Took its place among the elements. Our voices echo, magnifying your a… In a drafty museum, your nakedness
How the elements solidify! —— The moonlight, that chalk cliff In whose rift we lie Back to back. I hear an owl cry From its cold indigo.
Outside in the street I hear A car door slam; voices coming nea… Incoherent scraps of talk And high heels clicking up the wal… The doorbell rends the noonday hea…
No novice In those elaborate rituals Which allay the malice Of knotted table and crooked chair… The new woman in the ward
I am silver and exact. I have no… Whatever I see I swallow immediat… Just as it is, unmisted by love or… I am not cruel, only truthful— The eye of a little god, four-corn…
Nightfall, cold eye——neither dishe… These goatish tragedians who Hawk misfortune like figs and chic… And, plaintiff against each day, d… Nature’s partial, haphazard thumb.
The day you died I went into the… Into the lightless hibernaculum Where bees, striped black and gold… Like hieratic stones, and the grou… It was good for twenty years, that…
Ravening through the persistent br… Of blunt pencils, rose-sprigged co… Postage stamps, stacked books’ cla… Neighborhood cockcrow —all nature’… The vaunting mind
The winter landscape hangs in bala… Transfixed by glare of blue from g… The skaters freese within a stone… Air alters into glass and the whol… Grows brittle as a tilted china bo…
This man makes a pseudonym And crawls behind it like a worm. This woman on the telephone Says she is a man, not a woman. The mask increases, eats the worm,