Poetry
Spring 1963
Pharaoh Neco
You, Pharaoh Neco, with your rumbling gizzard, Your cat, your walleyed wizard, Your fish and cucumbers, your leeks and melons, Your bilious breath— Sais and Memphis squirming in your talons: […]
Poetry
Summer 1961
Joshua 2
Sad-eyed, slim-wristed, supple, very thin Was harlot Rahab: mindful of her kin. A pebble clicked the wall on which she nested, Her wan cheeks wasted, And snakelike rustling in, with […]
Voices in American Poetry
Summer 1984
Here, in the Desolate City
Here, in the desolate city, The tentative hooves of the buck clip the windy streets, And the stubborn spider decorously Laces the lovers’ sheets. The delicate heart-shaken mouse Whisks from […]
Voices in American Poetry
Summer 1984
The Forty-Acre Lot
Clean-handed coon, dimpling the spring,Under the redwood, under the bays,Whisker-deep in maidenhair fern,Does the fence still reel its rusty stringInto the slowly-turning sky?Do the hawks still mow their cloudy plotOver […]
Voices in American Poetry
Summer 1984
Argus, Dreaming
“But Argus now, after nineteen long years, no soonerSaw Odysseus again, than he gave in to fateAnd lay still in the grip of black death.” Odyssey, xvii His stiff hind […]