IA brackish reach of shoal off Madaket,-The sea was still breaking violently and nightHad steamed into our north Atlantic Fleet,when the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. LightFlashed from his matted head and marble feet,He grappled at the netWith the coiled, hurdling muscles of his thighs;The corpse was bloodless, a botch of red and whites,It’s open,…
Harpo Marx, your hands white-feathered the harp—the only words you ever spoke were sound.The movie’s not always the sick man of the arts,yours touched the stars; Harpo, your motion pictureis still life unchanging, not nature dead.I saw you first two years before you died,a black-and-white fall, near Fifth in Central Park;old blond hair too blonder,…
I hog a whole house on Boston’s‘hardly passionate Marlborough Street,’where even the manscavenging filth in the back alley trash cans,has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,and is ‘a young Republican.’I have a nine months’ daughter,young enough to be my granddaughter.Like the sun she rises in her flame-flamingo infants’ wear.These are the tranquilized Fifties,and I…
On the Potomac, swan-whitepower launches keep breasting the sulphurous wave.Otters slide and dive and slick back their hair,raccoons clean their meat in the creek.On the circles, green statues ride like South Americanliberators above the breeding vegetation—prongs and spearheads of some equatorialbackland that will inherit the globe.The elect, the elected . . . they come here…
it is so dull and gruesome how we die,unlike writing, life never finishes.Abel was finished; death is not remote,a flash-in-the-pan electrifies the skeptic,his cows crowding like skulls against high-voltage wire,his baby crying all night like a new machine.As in our Bibles, white-faced, predatory,the beautiful, mist-drunken hunter’s moon ascends–a child could give it a face: two…
pushed off for granitequarries on the islands,and left dozens of bleakwhite frame houses stucklike oyster shellson a hill of rock,and below us, the sea lappedthe raw little match-stickmazes of a weir,where the fish for bait were trapped.Remember? We sat on a slab of rock.From this distance in timeit seems the colorof iris, rotting and turning…
in broad daylight her gilded bed-posts shine,abandoned, almost Dionysian.At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street,blossoms on our magnolia ignitethe morning with their murderous five day’s white.All night I’ve held your hand,as if you hada fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad –its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye –and dragged me home alive….
And yuck-a, yuck-a, yuck-a, yuck-a, rageThe yellowhammers mating. Yellow fireBlankets the captives dancing on their pyre,And the scorched lictor screams and drops his rod.Trojans are singing to their drunken God,Ares. Their helmets catch on fire. Their filesClank by the body of my comrade—milesOf filings! Now the scythe-wheeled chariot rollsBefore their lances long as vaulting poles,And…
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;her sheep still graze above the sea.Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer is first selectman in our village;she’s in her dotage.Thirsting forthe hierarchic privacyof Queen Victoria’s centuryshe buys up allthe eyesores facing her shore,and lets them fall.The season’s ill-we’ve lost our summer millionaire,who seemed to leap from…
“I won’t go with you. I want to stay with Grandpa!”That’s how I threw cold wateron my Mother and Father’swatery martini pipe dreams at Sunday dinner.… Fontainebleau, Mattapoisett, Puget Sound….Nowhere was anywhere after a summerat my Grandfather’s farm.Diamond-pointed, athirst and Norman,its alley of poplarsparaded from Grandmother’s rose gardento a scary stand of virgin pine,scrub, and…
