Poetry
Autumn 1990
The Dwarf and Doctor Freud
Freud bled heavily both during and after the procedure [to remove a lesion from his palate] and was made to lie down on a cot “in a tiny room in […]
Poetry
Autumn 1990
Watchers
Photographed from the moon, [the Earth] seems to be a kind of organism. It is plainly in the process of developing, like an enormous embryo. It is, for all its […]
Nonfiction
Autumn 1990
The Long View
The most incredible aspect of Darwin’s Origin of the Species, from a psychological perspective, is that it does not culminate in despair and pessimism. What Darwin calls the “Struggle for […]
Poetry
Spring 1989
Cosmic Recycling
As part of the cosmic recycling system, the solar wind dumps hundreds of millions of tons of solar material into outer space each second. By using artificial satellites that can […]
Poetry
Spring 1989
Place
As Einstein expressed it, “all places in the universe are alike.” … Copernicus, in his model of the solar system, removed the earth from the center, so the earth was […]
Nonfiction
Autumn 1987
The Idea in the Mirror: Reflections on the Consciousness of Consciousness
I Hamlet’s speech to the players in which he admonishes them to hold “the mirror up to nature” has given us one of the criteria for literary art that has […]
Poetry
Winter 1986
Calling for Help
But Clayfeld couldn’t reconstructthe morning when that ghostly voice first called for help, and his hypothesis—based on the time he fell while fishing with his father from a boat when he was […]
Poetry
Winter 1986
Clayfeld Atones
A foot of snow descended in the night; their road was drifted in.“No need to wake the kids for school,” Clayfeld decided, swaddled stillin his own stumbling body’s drowsy heat. A long, relieving […]
Nonfiction
Winter 1985
The Tears of Art
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third, Were axioms to him, who’d never heard Of any world where promises were kept Or one could weep because another wept. […]
Poetry
Winter 1981
Trillium
Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this—you are his daughter just as you are mine—I think your father’s having an affair. Last spring he started hiking in the woods, just as […]
Poetry
Winter 1981
The Cracked Apple Tree
Right on that branch we saw the snowy owl the one time it arrived from Canada. Don’t cut it down! I know it’s past the age for bearing useful fruit; […]
Poetry
Autumn 1965
Home from the Cemetery
I Pennies glitter where his eyes should be. I stand suddenly, trembling wet, before him. Rising from his back, he plucks the pennies away And reads to me from a […]
Poetry
Summer 1963
Self-Portrait
The eyes are lying again, posing. Pluck out Their whispers! Blur the left one that likes corners, Will not look back, staring through the grackle-dark— Are you out there? What […]