Poetry
Autumn 1993
The Camps
“Yes, art is palliative; but the substance of art is real. Can you make something from nothing?” IVAN TOLKACHENKO When the young brown-haired woman was shot a drop of blood […]
Poetry
Autumn 1993
Surrealism
for Charlie S. Ah, another summer morning. Air so thick it’ll make your teeth wrinkle and your toes stop talking to one another. So a mourning dove—damned clumsy perchers—alights teeteringly […]
Poetry
Autumn 1993
Waterloo
Overlooking the battlefield, on that grassy ridge where the ladies and gentlemen of Brussels brought their servants and picnic hampers and card tables to watch, you could smell the exploding […]
Poetry
Autumn 1993
Ecstasy
For years it was in sex and I thought this was the most of it, so brief a moment of transport out of oneself or in music which lasted a […]
Poetry
Summer 1989
Ideal
Does a time come when two people love one another so completely that they don’t need to say it? That would be the ideal perhaps. When we go out to […]
Personally Speaking
Winter 1986
The Defeated Generation
Is some kind of affirmation implicit in any creating? I believe so. And I believe the history of western art from the Renaissance to the present could be recounted in […]
Poetry
Spring 1968
Once More
Once more by the brook the alder leaves turn mauve, bronze, violet, beautiful after the green of crude summer; galled black stems, pithy, tangled, twist in the flesh-colored vines of […]
Poetry
Summer 1960
Abelard Remembering
(A fragment from a longer poem.) And praise therefore the woman, Beauty as prime experience, breaking. Praise Her hair flowing; saying of its softnesses That candlelights were sieved to […]
Poetry
Autumn 1950
Littoral
Deplore the poor and faithless mind That hears far winds from overseas, That knows the shoreward waves defined In formal tidings, artful pleas. The arm is quieted by guess, Caressing […]
Poetry
Autumn 1950
The Snow
I This is the white king’s palace: snowflakes flounce On every draught, dally in secret aisles, Bow, and depart—an instant clap of fury, And winds, O sparrow, shake your chandelier […]