Collected Poems
Page 73
A milk-glass bowl hanging by three chains, 171
Ammonia, 762
Amnesia, 420
A mother’s letter, torn open, 746
And could it be I saw you, 1074
And Now, 776
And now, outside, the walls, 243
And now as you read these poems, 776
And this is how you live: a woman, children, 387
And when was dust a thing so rash?, 34
An idea declared itself between us, 860
An interval: the view across the fields, 100
Ankles shackled, 1109
Annotation for an Epitaph, 51
An old man’s wasting brain; a ruined city, 35
An old shoe, an old pot, an old skin, 191
Antinoüs: The Diaries, 125
A nurse on the battlefield, 409
Any Husband to Any Wife, 196
A piece of thread ripped-out from a fierce design, 285
Apology (I’ve said: I wouldn’t ever), 142
Apology (You, invincibly yourself), 70
A potato explodes in the oven. Poetry and famine, 718
Archaic, 993
Architect, 864
Armitage of scrapiron for the radiations of a moon, 280
A room papered with clippings, 979
Artificial Intelligence, 136
Art of Translation, The, 805
As Ever, 1000
As ever, death. Whenever, where. But it’s, 1000
As finally by wind or grass, 939
As for me, I distrust the commonplace, 4
A smell of further honey, 207
A soldier is here, an ancient figure, 200
As solid-seeming as antiquity, 137
At a Bach Concert, 21
At a Deathbed in the Year Two Thousand, 15
At Hertford House, 58
A thinking woman sleeps with monsters, 118
Atlas of the Difficult World, An, 707
At Majority, 109
Attention, 140
At the end of Alphaville, 336
At the head of this poem I have laid out, 780
At the Jewish New Year, 159
at the oak table under the ceiling fan, 732
At the wings of the mirror, peacock plumes, 331
at your table, 628
August, 398
Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers, 4
Aunt Jennifer’s tigers prance across a screen, 4
Autumn Equinox, 72
Autumn Sequence, 191
Autumn torture. The old signs, 125
A Walk by the Charles, 92
A white woman dreaming of innocence, 602
A wild patience has taken me this far, 523
A woman in the shape of a monster, 300
A woman of sixty driving, 739
A woman of the citizen party—what’s that—, 1095
A woman waking behind grimed blinds slatted across a courtyard, 344
A woman walking in a walker on the cliffs, 692
A woman wired in memories, 740
Axel, darkly seen, in a glass house, 1074
Axel, in thunder, 1072
Axel, the air’s beaten, 1072
Axel Avákar, 1071
Axel: backstory, 1071
A young girl knows she is young and meant to live, 738
Back to the shallow pondsharp rotting scatter, 947
Ballade of the Poverties, 1081
Baltimore: a fragment from the Thirties, 627
Banging the coffee-pot into the sink, 117
Beardless again, phoning, 330
Bears, 55
Beast and bird must bow aside, 61
Beethoven’s “Appassionata” played on a parlor grand piano, 886
Before the acute, 876
Behind the Motel, 983
Benjamin Revisited, 1049
Beside the Mare Crisium, that sea, 63
Beside this door a January tree, 8
Birds and periodic blood, 248
Blacked-out on a wagon, part of my life cut out forever—, 279
Black Locket, 1091
blinds me, 325
Blood-Sister, 412
Blue Ghazals, The, 307
Blue Rock, 631
Book, The, 253
Boundary, 18
Bract, 948
Break, The, 249
Breakfast in a Bowling Alley in Utica, New York, 177
Breakpoint, 320
Burning Kangaroo, A, 1024
Burning of Paper Instead of Children, The, 303
Burning Oneself In, 393
Burning Oneself Out, 394
Burn me some music Send my roots rain I’m swept, 1047
Burnt by lightning nevertheless, 1103
By No Means Native, 9
Calibrations, 976
Called up in sleep: your voice, 1024
Calle Visión, 759
Calle Visión sand in your teeth, 760
Calle Visión your heart beats on unbroken, 761
Call me Sebastian, arrows sticking all over, 1088
Camino Real, 822
Can history show us nothing, 132
Can I easily say, 143
Can it be growing colder when I begin, 475
Capital, The, 101
Cartographies of Silence, 455
Catch if you can your country’s moment, begin, 716
Caustic implacable, 1082
Celebration in the Plaza, The, 52
Centaur’s Requiem, 895
Chagall’s sweet lovers mounting into blue, 98
Change of World, A, 28
Char, 812
Charleston in the 1860’s, 242
Children Playing Checkers at the Edge of the Forest, 668
Child with a chip of mirror in his eye, 87
Circum/Stances, 1084
City, 235
City and world: this infection drinks like a drinker, 952
Classmate, The, 145
Clayton, we can’t, 863
Clock in the Square, A, 12
Close to your body, in the, 519
Coast to Coast, 522
Cold wit leaves me cold, 993
Collaborations, 926
Colophon, 91
Coming by evening through the wintry city, 21
Completely protected on all sides, 264
Concord River, 67
Confrontation, The, 130
Confrontations, 1083
Consanguinity, 132
Continuum, 261
Contradictions: Tracking Poems, 639
Corpse-Plant, The, 171
—Could you see me laboring over this, 1011
Courage Her face in the leaves the polygons, 479
Covenant, The, 134
Cruelty is rarely conscious, 332
Crusaders’ wind glinting, 271
Culture and Anarchy, 525
Curtis and I sit drinking auburn sherry, 18
Dangerous of course to draw, 774
Darklight, 748
Days: Spring, The, 291
Dead, dead, dead, dead, 226
Deadstillness over droughtlands, 699
Dead winter doesn’t die, 176
Dear Adrienne, I feel signified by pain, 644
Dear Adrienne: I’m calling you up tonight, 643
Dear Parents: I’m the daughter, 674
Death, goodlooking as only a skeleton can get, 1092
Death’s taxi crackles through the mist. The cheeks, 135
Deliberately, long-ago, 425
Delivered Clean, 907
Delta, 683
Demon Lover, The, 237
Demonstration, The, 246
Deportations, 775
Desert as Garden of Paradise, The, 677
Design in Living Colors, 29
Despair falls, 605
Dialogue, 370
Diamond Cutters, The, 104
Did anyone ever know who we were, 653
Did the fox speak to you?, 623
Did you think I was talkin
g about my life?, 278
Dien Bien Phu, 409
“Difficult ordinary happiness,” 169
Director’s Notes, 1007
Dislocations: Seven Scenarios, 949
Diving into the Wreck, 370
Divisions of Labor, 693
Domain, 1051
Don’t Flinch, 1090
Don’t Take Me, 959
Double Monologue, 126
Doves bleat, crows repeat, 1109
Down the river, on rafts you came, 274
Down this old well, 148
Draft #2006, 1031
Dreams Before Waking, 605
Dreamwood, 685
Dulce ridens, dulce loquens, 119
Dull-headed, with dull fingers, 221
Dwingelo, 236
Early day. Grey the air, 748
Easier to encapsulate your lives, 551
Eastern War Time, 736
Eastport to Block Island, 14
Eben Haëzer, 209
Edges, 637
Education of a Novelist, 599
Either you will, 150
Embroidered in a tapestry of green, 29
Emergency Clinic, 1082
Emily Carr, 623
Enclosed in this disturbing mutual wood, 43
End of an Era, 140
Endpapers, 1118
Ends of the Earth, 889
Epilogue for a Masque of Purcell, 61
Equinox, 895
Essential Resources, 410
Europe 1953, 539
Euryclea’s Tale, 115
Even if we knew the children were all asleep, 626
Evenings seem endless, now, 223
Even Then Maybe, 1006
Even when I thought I prayed, I was talking to myself; when I, 340
Ever, Again, 1025
Every peak is a crater. This is the law of volcanoes, 470
Everywhere, snow is falling. Your bandaged foot, 245
Evil Eye, The, 130
Exceptional, 546
Explorers, The, 63
Eye, The, 908
Face, 149
Face flashing free child-arms, 662
Faces in the mesh: defiance or disdain, 953
Face to Face, 202
Fact of a Doorframe, The, 438
Fallen Figure, 1000
False history gets made all day, any day, 564
Family Romance, 424
Fantasies of old age, 385
Far back when I went zig-zagging, 231
Fashions are changing in the sphere, 28
Fatigue, regrets. The lights, 237
Fever, 209
Finality broods upon the things that pass, 92
Final Notations, 749
Fire, 867
First having read the book of myths, 371
First Things, 139
Five O’Clock, Beacon Hill, 18
Five O’Clock, January 2003, 957
5:30 a.m., 248
Five: voices, 795
Flesh and Blood, 233
Focus, 202
Fond credos, plaster ecstasies!, 184
Food Packages:1947, 773
Footsole to scalp alive facing the window’s black mirror, 781
For a Friend in Travail, 745
For an Album, 684
For an Anniversary, 807
For an Occupant, 623
For a Russian Poet, 245
For a Sister, 395
Foreknown. The victor, 317
For Ethel Rosenberg, 539
For Julia in Nebraska, 531
For June, in the Year 2001, 898
For L.G.: Unseen for Twenty Years, 421
For Memory, 535
For more than five thousand years, 159
For recalcitrancy of attitude, 952
For the Conjunction of Two Planets, 39
For the Dead, 396
For the Felling of an Elm in the Harvard Yard, 11
For the Record, 593
For the Young Anarchists, 1105
For This, 859
Four: history, 794
Four Short Poems, 885
Fourth Month of the Landscape Architect, The, 416
Fox, 865
Fracture, 1053
Fragments of an Opera, 1106
Frame, 558
From 1964: a color snapshot: you, 610
From a Chapter on Literature, 19
From an Old House in America, 425
From a Survivor, 396
From commissars of daylight, 95
from crush and splinter, 1003
From here on, all of us will be living, 284
From Morning-Glory to Petersburg, 110
From Piercéd Darkness, 785
From shores of sickness: skin of the globe stretches and snakes, 1065
From Sickbed Shores, 1065
From Strata, 1114
From the archaic ships the green and red, 20
From the new crudities, from the old, 886
From the Prison House, 367
From you I want more than I’ve ever asked, 756
Frost, burning. The city’s ill, 311
Gabriel, 267
Generosity, 1092
Ghost of a Chance, 147
Girl between home and school what is that girl, 736
Glance into glittering moisture, 1020
goes through what must be gone through, 731
Going home by lamplight across Boston Common, 26
Good-by to you whom I shall see tomorrow, 23
Grandmothers, 550
Grating, 872
Guard the knowledge, 677
Hail-spurting sky sun, 877
“Half-cracked” to Higginson, living, 189
Halfway, 190
Harpers Ferry, 688
Heart of cold. Bones of cold. Scalp of cold, 641
He had come nearly half a thousand miles, 77
Here among tables lit with bottled tapers, 6
Here from the corridor of an English train, 59
Here is a map of our country, 711
“He Remembereth That We Are Dust,” 34
Heroines, 546
He seized me by the waist and kissed my throat … , 242
He slammed his hand across my face and I, 642
He thought there would be a limit and that it would stop him, 720
He writes: Let us bear, 291
Ho! in the dawn, 197
Holding Out, 232
Holiday, 100
Homage to Winter, 629
Homecoming, 213
Hopes sparkle like water in the clean carafe, 317
Hotel, 998
Hot stink of skunk, 822
House at the Cascades, The, 44
How a bed once dressed with a kindly quilt becomes, 887
However legendary, 104
How telegrams used to come: ring, 737
Hubble Photographs: After Sappho, 1001
Hunger, 451
I almost trust myself to know, 420
I am composing on the typewriter late at night, thinking of today, 306
“I Am in Danger—Sir—,” 189
I am trying to imagine, 414
“I am up at sunrise, 318
I am walking rapidly through striations of light and dark thrown, 307
I bid you cast out pity, 15
I came out of the hospital like a woman, 646
I can see myself years back at Sunion, 469
I can’t name love now, 139
Ice splits under the metal, 454
I come home from you through the early light of spring, 466
I could look at you a long time, 149
Ideal Landscape, 51
Ideas of order … Sinner of the Florida keys, 309
I don’t know, 410
I don’t see your head, 260
I dreamed I called you on the telephone, 396
I dreamed the Finnish Hotel founded by Finns in an olden time, 998
I Dream I’m the Death of Orpheus, 307
If, antique hateful bird, 122
If, says the Dahomeyan devil, 271
If all we would speak is ideology, 923
If/As Though, 1019
If I lay on that beach with you, 473
If I’ve reached for your lines (I have), 859
If she appears, hands ringed with rings, 566
If she’s writing a letter on a sheet of mica, 933
If the road’s a frayed ribbon strung through dunes, 1118
If these are letters, they will have to be misread, 284
If to feel is to be unreliable, 650
If you have taken this rubble for my past, 683
If you know who died in that bed, do you know, 744
If Your Name Is on the List, 875
If your name is on the list of judges, 875
I have backroads I take to places, 649
I have in my head some images of you, 561
I have seen the mob of late, 17
I have to weep when I see it, the grown boy fretting, 115
I Heard a Hermit Speak, 90
I kissed you, bride and lost, and went, 112
I know: you are glycerine, 196
I know you are reading this poem, 727
I love the infinity of these silent spaces, 866
I’m afraid of prison. Have been all these years, 645
Images, The, 519
Images for Godard, 334
Imagine a city where nothing’s, 836
Implosions, 259
Improvisation on Lines from Edwin Muir’s “Variations on a Time Theme,” 995
In a bald skull sits our friend in a helmet, 652
In a bookstore on the East Side, 393
In a Classroom, 665
In a gigantic pot de chambre, scrolled, 141
In a vast dystopic space the small things, 951
In Central Park we talked of our own cowardice, 278
Incipience, 362
In Colcha embroidery, I learn, 565
I need a gloss for the silence implicit in my legacy, 906
I needed fox Badly I needed, 865
In Memoriam: D.K., 667
In my dream, children, 241
In my imagination I was the pivot of a fresh beginning, 341
Innocence, 1050
Innocence: 1945, 773
Innocents, The, 33
In paradise every, 958
In Plain Sight, 981
Inscriptions, 789
In search of the desert witch, the shamaness, 566
Insomniacs, The, 85
Insusceptibles, The, 55
Integrity, 523
Interior monologue of the poet, 337
In the black net, 764
In the dark year an angry rain came down, 22
In the Evening, 234
In the field the air writhes, a heat-pocket, 190
In the heart of pain where mind is broken, 818
In the heart of the queen anne’s lace, a knot of blood, 196
In their own way, by their own lights, 401