PASTORAL INTERLUDE Our patient sleeping at last, I have come out into the garden bringing this novel with me: I do not think they will think of looking for me here, and I shall be able, perhaps, in these stolen moments, to get down, on the copyright page or the blank flyleaf or crushed in the margins, my impressions of recent events and order my all-too-scattered thoughts. It is crucial I think clearly, I know that, now more than ever, and yet my mind will stray . . . ; how tall these walls of green are!
The Queen
Once upon a time there was a queen, but she didn’t have anything, any chairs.
She didn’t have any books.
She didn’t have any children.
All she had was a coat and a crown.
Americana
Mother, I know your kitchen’s nothing like mine,
with its flawless faucet and its limeguarded sink.
With a wingnut in my fist, I stumble
into the kitchen, it’s telling me something, I think:
hatchling, she says, the sun swallowing itself, I can’t see. . . .
Telepathy
memories. I lay in a perambulator.
six to nine months. On my right were two horses—
the brown one was staring at me
very intently
The Tragic Drama of Joy
Late that night it rained so hard the world
seemed flattened for good.
But the grocer knew the earth had a big gut
and could hold more than enough.
Operative Truth
Unfortunately, my love for you continues on like a pilot light.
I hate the relief its status as a survival mechanism provides.
I hate the flicker of interest despite my prescient sense of your failing
the way I would listen to an inaugural address.
Kissinger at Peace
NYRR, 5:43 pm, blond scrams into my car, suede purse swinging, reception suit askew, badminton bracelet rattling like a second set of teeth. Upsets the computer programmer with the cage on his lap containing the calikitty going to the North Shore Animal League for repairs but not me. Not this Kissinger. I live for the third rail.
What’s American About Form?
Frank Bidart: Modernism in English poetry was the creation of Americans, and Pound was the central figure in this. You know his famous assertions: “Make it new,” “Literature is news that stays news.” Even in that very famous and influential essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot talks about an ideal order made by all the works of art of the past, and that to enter that order you have to do something that’s new. The premise is that to make a poem that truly joins those works that constitute what people understand as the heritage of literature, you have to be new.
The Bedouin Ark
Repetition as de-existence
as condoned & re-spun vapour
which continues to post-exist
as mirages across an ark
as lucid underwater scent
Rend
Watch me I put my fist in my mouth because I can.
Oh, humiliated, you should do something with your mouth.
My doctor said that. He was stained up his chin.
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