Poetry
Summer 1980
Up
Lone oddly-crowned speaker is trudging uphill, bent by an unseen weight. Bare landscape except for a stunted olive tree and an oversize cactus. 1 Uphill: Sometimes I fell; Reached up […]
Poetry
Winter 1979
To My under Water Moon
When fall-rains hone the cheekbones of my planet And fall-mists breathe upon my windowpane, How serene you are, harvest-moon bridesmaid! Till the deeps caterwaul:— Then the rays, the rays, the […]
Poetry
Summer 1955
Looking up Again and Again while Walking
1. Was ever blue such undespairing blue? Familiar sweep of perfect careless brows: What else but she, translated into sky? One summer I had a sister used to tilt Her […]
Poetry
Summer 1955
I Am an Old Town-Square
Come closer, build on me. . . . My land has wrapped her History round me in a sevenfold quilt, Whose layers are towns. A crass and tinny scepter, Such […]
Poetry
Summer 1954
To My Isis
Death never was my king; I stalled his powers Ten years by dollars and by doctors. Even That time when he outflanked me, iced and shriven, A traffic jam held […]
Poetry
Winter 1952
Sonnet on the Soul of Man
(“Every day, with statistical regularity, somebody is somewhere or other choosing suicide by drowning in sea water.”) Through this mild mist I let your hostile spray Gnash harmless at my […]
Book Reviews
Winter 1948
Stevens Revisited
Harmonium by Wallace Stevens. (New edition.) Knopf. $3.00 Transport to Summer by Wallace Stevens. Knopf. $3.00 Certainly one of the four most powerful catalysts of poetry between the two […]
Poetry
Autumn 1947
From Ancient Fangs
(The time of this poem is in the far future, shortly after peace and love return to earth.) I. Like lamp of intricate stained glass which hangs From curved blue […]
Poetry
Spring 1947
Now Kindness
1. This was the summer when the tired girls Breathed in the parks another planet’s air And stretched like hyphens between Here and There, Stretched and lounged and yawned on […]