January 1, 1996
Dazzle
For such blue this dazzle what sacrifice? None too great, none. Let liars in public trust go free? All day! Saints tear singer and soothsayer? Wives and husbands strop knives in the jealous […]
January 1, 1996
Orpheus
Before the end, before the lovers spoke only in numbers, before the photographs replaced memory, before vanity became a form of passion and chic men and women stood idly before […]
January 1, 1996
Harriet Strong (1844-1926)
Harriet Strong devoted twenty years to marriage, suffering a severe nervous disorder until age forty, when her husband committed suicide. She then became a celebrated entrepreneur. —(from an abstract […]
January 1, 1996
The Land of the Dead
I. Coyote’s Impulse In the winter of 1929-30, Archie Phinney went to the Fort Lapwai Indian reservation in northeastern Idaho to record stories told by his sixty-year-old mother, Wayfilatpu, […]
January 1, 1996
The Story of Poetry and Poets
for Charles Shepherdson A man and a women have fallen in love. On the day of their wedding the woman dies and is led away into the land of […]
January 1, 1996
Orpheus in the Underworld
Special Section: Orpheus. Descending. Still jet lagged after a fourteen-hour transatlantic flight held over at Logan while the weather cleared, his night-long fitful tossing in the hotel has at […]
January 1, 1996
Sacred Waters
The sun has only a short way to fall behind the Italian Alps, but full dark is a long time coming. These endless evenings draw the ill and elderly out […]
January 1, 1996
The Outer Banks
We walked out to watch the sun set into the sound, sinking sullen feet into the sand. The sun gleamed with a cooling flame like memory, like an apparition […]
January 1, 1996
Pure Ereshkigal
I thought I’d drive out to the slaughterhouse to get me a real meat hook, but now that won’t be necessary because day before yesterday, working her wise and wicked […]
January 1, 1996
This Third Light
Skin of green-black glint, mosaic wings: this housefly, old beyond hope or exhausted from how many stabs at the glass, performs slow death on my sill in a stumble of […]