October 1, 1993
A New Notice of Motion: The Lover Waiting
You said you were coming. In the meantime the sun spider is circling before the tilting horizon upside down, and the founding of the orb snail is spiraling itself into […]
October 1, 1993
The Doctor
Essential hypertension, uncontrolled,Is almost immortality. The pressure Of blood inside the arteries I measure With mercury, reflecting on the soul: Both liquid and a heavy metal, trapped And beautiful—a subtle […]
October 1, 1993
Confessions of a Metamorph
I In Which the Author Recounts the Surprising Circumstances By Which, After Having Started Out As a Poet, She Became a Science-Fiction Writer in Mid-Life I arrived at the University of […]
October 1, 1993
True North/2: Our Home the Earth
For help from the spinning earth, you need a stick driven into the ground. Turning, the earth makes the Sun appear to rise and cross the sky—and set in the […]
October 1, 1993
True North/3: It’s Hard
The noontime shadow changes length very slowly. The noontime shadow is only one length: its length at noon. The noontime shadow—my clock is usually off anyway; it’s hard. It mean […]
October 1, 1993
True North/1: The Lover Wishes to Be of Unending
secret service to the beloved. When the beloved is God, this is hard; except for the atheist. A magnetic compass, even without interference from nearby masses of iron—the steel frame […]
October 1, 1993
Illness
Imagine that the bed is not a bed And illness is a cave, the bags of blood Stalactites, the doctors eyeless fish—Imagine that an illness is a cave From which […]
October 1, 1993
Death Vision
I think it’s a multiplication of sight, like after a low hovering autumn rain when the invisible webs of funnel weavers and sheetweb weavers all at once are seen where […]
October 1, 1993
Considering All the Moving Light, All the Stationary Darkness
Is light ever still? Not the blowing, feathery light of the fairy shrimp or the cartwheeling light-bones of the skeleton shrimp, not the shingled lake-light of wavering water in wind, […]
October 1, 1993
Allegory
Outside somewhere, beneath an atmosphere So pure and new each breath is musical And silent, mouth-watering without taste, So full of butterflies one can’t imagine Because it hurts to be […]
October 1, 1993
The Future
When I was five or six—so this would be around 1954—we’d drive out to the airport on occasional weekend nights, for entertainment. It was cheap, that may have been its […]
October 1, 1993
Lecture to Third-Year Medical Students
for Peter Russo My first recommendation–suction an ample volume of bone marrow, separate a sample for pathology, incubate the rest in fetal media, freeze it, administer a lethal dose of […]