For Susan O'Neill Roe
#Americans #Suicide #Women #XXCentury
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,
Flintlike, her feet struck Such a racket of echoes from the s… Tacking in moon-blued crooks from… Stone-built town, that she heard t… Its tinder and shake
In Benidorm there are melons, Whole donkey—carts full Of innumerable melons, Ovals and balls, Bright green and thumpable
This is newness: every little tawd… Obstacle glass-wrapped and peculia… Glinting and clinking in a saint’s… Don’t know what to make of the sud… The blind, white, awful, inaccessi…
On storm—struck deck, wind sirens… With each tilt, shock and shudder,… Cleaves forward into fury; dark as… Waves wallop, assaulting the stubb… Flayed by spray, we take the chall…
(I) This is the sea, then, this great… How the sun’s poultice draws on my… Electrifyingly—colored sherbets, s… By pale girls, travel the air in s…
deep in liquid turquoise slivers of dilute light quiver in thin streaks of bright tinfoil
I’ve got a stubborn goose whose gu… Honeycombed with golden eggs, Yet won’t lay one. She, addled in her goose-wit, stru… The barnyard like those taloned ha…
Who are these people at the bridge… The rector, the midwife, the sexto… In my sleeveless summery dress I… And they are all gloved and covere… They are smiling and taking out ve…
But I would rather be horizontal. I am not a tree with my root in th… Sucking up minerals and motherly l… So that each March I may gleam in… Nor am I the beauty of a garden b…
In sunless air, under pines Green to the point of blackness, s… Founding father set these lobed, w… To loom in the leaf—filtered gloom Black as the charred knuckle—bones
Summer grows old, cold—blooded mot… The insects are scant, skinny. In these palustral homes we only Croak and wither. Mornings dissipate in somnolence.
You bring me good news from the cl… Whipping off your silk scarf, exhi… Mummy—cloths, smiling: I’m all ri… When I was nine, a lime—green ane… Fed me banana gas through a frog—m…
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…
Once I was ordinary: Sat by my father’s bean tree Eating the fingers of wisdom. The birds made milk. When it thundered I hid under a f…