Poetry
Summer 1994
On the Plight of Us in the Caravaggio
A detail from The Sacrifice of Isaac painted by Michelangelo Amerighi da Caravaggio The decision is made, issues are joined, the eyes close, one exhales, the body shudders, night has […]
Poetry
Summer 1991
Joyce on the French Coast Waiting for the Dark
Though one should not know too soon what he waits for,what the posture implies, should not surmise the precise music with which the man struggles, in which we find him, […]
A Poem
Autumn 1985
A Photograph by August Sander (Young Girl in a Circus Wagon, Düren, 1932)
Even in this grey light the nail heads sing. Even beneath this weather something falls not quite daylight and not yet wholly darkness. Admittedly, we have been given little, beyond […]
Poetry
Summer 1959
A
First of the alphabet, my tongue has pondered visions of fluent sources, sheer beginnings, white acres and infinities of silence strewn in a wake behind us, brine of absence, so […]
Poetry
Summer 1959
Tony Said
Make me a circus, Tony said, whose likes shall strip the habit of my breath away, and dream the breathing chastened into hoops from which blue acrobats juggle the planet […]
Poetry
Summer 1959
Fabulists
More than the light of summer and the shimmer rising and faintly falling did they fashion, more than the fiction of the night and sea and colors of the water […]
Poetry
Spring 1957
The Road
I like the story of the circus waif bought by the man-of-weights to be his mistress, Profit the demon dragging her to market and Lust the soul who paid in […]
Poetry
Spring 1956
Twenty-Eight
The porch supports riddled in rain and eaten with the sun are undergoing that replacement keener than sheer naked boards fragrant and young beneath the plane, that deep displacement cleaner […]
Poetry
Spring 1956
This Alice
She, too, the voyaging in doors and Keys, blue portals to the Indies in the seas, and cinnamon and sun at Creole teas. She, too, looked only forward with the […]