| Contents: |
A change of world (1951). Storm warnings -- Aunt Jennifer's tigers -- Vertigo -- The ultimate act -- What ghosts can say -- The kursaal at Interlaken -- Reliquary -- Purely local -- A view of the terrace -- By no means native -- Air without incense -- For the felling of an elm in the Harvard yard -- A clock in the square -- Why else but to forestall this hour -- This beast, this angel -- Eastport to Block Island -- At a deathbed in the year two thousand -- Afterward -- The uncle speaks in the drawing room -- Boundary -- Five o'clock, Beacon Hill -- From a chapter on literature -- An unsaid word -- Mathilde in Normandy -- At a Bach concert -- The rain of blood -- Stepping backward -- Itinerary -- A revivalist in Boston -- The return of the evening grosbeaks -- The springboard -- A change of world -- Unsounded -- Design in living colors -- Walden 1950 -- Sunday evening -- The innocents -- "He remembereth that we are dust" -- Life and letters -- For the conjunction of two planets
Poems (1950-1951). The prisoners -- Night -- The house at the Cascades -- The roadway -- Pictures by Vuillard -- Orient wheat -- Versailles -- Annotation for an epitaph -- Ideal landscape -- The celebration in the plaza -- The tourist and the town -- Bears -- The insusceptibles -- Lucifer in the train -- Recorders in Italy -- At Hertford House -- The wild sky -- The prospect -- Epilogue for a masque of Purcell -- Villa Adriana -- The explorers -- Landscape of the star -- Letter from the land of sinners -- Concord River -- Apology -- Living in sin -- Autumn equinox -- The strayed village -- The perennial answer -- The insomniacs -- The snow queen -- Love in the museum -- I heard a hermit speak -- Colophon -- A walk by the Charles -- New year morning -- In time of carnival -- The middle-aged -- The marriage portion -- The tree -- Lovers are like children -- When this clangor in the brain -- A view of Merton College -- Holiday -- The capital -- The platform -- Last song -- The diamond cutters
Snapshots of a daughter-in-law (1963). At majority -- From morning-glory to Petersburg -- Rural reflections -- The knights -- The loser. I. I kissed you, bride and lost, and went -- II. Well, you are tougher than I thought. -- The absent-minded are always to blame -- Euryclea's tale -- September 21 -- After a sentence in "Malte Laurids Brigge" -- Snapshots of a daughter-in-law. 1. You, once a belle in Shreveport, -- 2. Banging the coffee-pot into the sink -- 3. A thinking woman sleeps with monsters. -- 4. Knowing themselves too well in one another: -- 5. Dulce ridens, dulce loquens -- 6. When to her lute Corinna sings -- 7. "To have in this uncertain world some stay -- 8. "You all die at fifteen," said Diderot, -- 9. Not that it is done well, but -- 10. Well, -- Passing on -- The raven -- Merely to know. I. Wedged in by earthworks -- II. Let me take you by the hair -- III. Spirit like water -- Antinoüs: the diaries -- Juvenilia -- Double monologue -- A woman mourned by daughters -- Readings of history. I. The evil eye -- II. The confrontation -- III. Memorabilia -- IV. Consanguinity -- V. The mirror -- VI. The covenant -- To the airport -- The afterwake -- Artificial intelligence -- A marriage in the 'sixties -- First things -- Attention -- End of an era -- Rustication -- Apology -- Sisters -- In the north -- The classmate -- Peeling onions -- Ghost of a chance -- The well -- Novella -- Face -- Prospective immigrants please note -- Likeness -- The lag -- Always the same -- Peace -- The roofwalker
Poems (1955-1957). At the Jewish new year -- Moving in winter -- Necessities of life (1966). Part one: Poems 1962-1965. Necessities of life -- In the woods -- The corpse-plant -- The trees -- Like this together. 1. Wind rocks the car. -- 2. They're tearing down, tearing up -- 3. We have, as they say, -- 4. Our words misunderstand us. -- 5. Dead winter doesn't die, -- Breakfast in a bowling alley in Utica, New York -- Open-air museum -- Two songs. 1. Sex, as they harshly call it, -- 2. That "old last act"! -- The parting -- Night-pieces: for a child. The crib -- Her waking -- The stranger -- After dark. I. You are falling asleep and I sit looking at you -- II. Now let's away from prison-- -- Mourning picture -- "I am in danger--sir--" -- Halfway -- Autumn sequence. 1. An old shoe, an old pot, an old skin, -- 2. Still, as sweetness hardly earned -- 3. Your flag is dried-blood, turkey-comb -- 4. Skin of wet leaves on asphalt. -- Noon -- Not like that -- The knot -- Any husband to any wife -- Side by side -- Spring thunder. 1. Thunder is all it is, and yet -- 2. Whatever you are that weeps -- 3. The power of the dinosaur -- 4. A soldier is here, an ancient figure, -- 5. Over him, over you, a great roof is rising, -- Moth hour -- Focus -- Face to face -- Part two: Translations from the Dutch. Martinus Nijhoff, the song of the foolish bees -- Hendrik de Vries, my brother -- Hendrik de Vries, fever -- Gerrit Achterberg, Eben Haëzer -- Gerrit Achterberg, accountability -- Gerrit Achterberg, statue -- Leo Vroman, our family -- Chr. J. van Geel, homecoming -- Chr. J. van Geel, sleepwalking -- Poems (1962-1965). To Judith, taking leave -- Roots -- The parting: II -- Winter
Leaflets (1969). Part one: Night watch. Orion -- Holding out -- Flesh and blood -- In the evening -- Missing the point -- City (from the Dutch of Gerrit Achterberg) -- Dwingelo (from the Dutch of Gerrit Achterberg) -- The demon lover -- Jerusalem -- Charleston in the 1860's -- Night watch -- There are such springlike nights (from the Yiddish of Kadia Molodowsky) -- For a Russian poet. 1. The winter dream -- 2. Summer in the country -- 3. The demonstration -- Night in the kitchen -- 5:30 A.M. -- The break -- Two poems (adapted from Anna Akhmatova). 1. There's a secret boundary hidden in the waving grasses: -- 2. On the terrace, violins played -- The key -- Picnic -- The book -- Abnegation -- Part two: Leaflets. Women -- Implosions -- To Frantz Fanon -- Continuum -- On edges -- Violence -- The observer -- Nightbreak -- Gabriel -- Leaflets. 1. The big star, and that other -- 2. Your face -- 3. If, says the Dahomeyan devil, -- 4. Crusaders' wind glinting -- 5. The strain of being born -- The rafts -- Part three: Ghazals (homage to Ghalib). The clouds are electric in this university. -- The ones who camped on the slopes, below the bare summit, -- In Central Park we talked of our own cowardice. -- Did you think I was talking about my life? -- Blacked-out on a wagon, part of my life cut out forever-- -- When they mow the fields, I see the world reformed -- Armitage of scrapiron for the radiations of a moon. -- When your sperm enters me, it is altered; -- The sapling springs, the milkweed blooms: obsolete nature. -- The friend I can trust is the one who will let me have my death. -- Last night you wrote on the wall: revolution is poetry. -- A dead mosquito, flattened against a door; -- So many minds in search of bodies -- The order of the small town on the riverbank, -- If these are letters, they will have to be misread. -- From here on, all of us will be living -- A piece of thread ripped-out from a fierce design, -- Poems (1967-1969). Postcard -- White night (from the Yiddish of Kadia Molodowsky) -- The days: spring -- Tear gas
The will to change (1971). November 1968 -- Study of history -- Planetarium -- The burning of paper instead of children. 1. My neighbor, a scientist and art-collector, ... -- 2. To imagine a time of silence -- 3. "People suffer highly in poverty ... -- 4. We lie under the sheet -- 5. I am composing on the typewriter late at night, ... -- I dream I'm the death of Orpheus -- The blue ghazals. Violently asleep in the old house. -- One day of equinoctial light after another, -- A man, a woman, a city. -- Ideas of order ... sinner of the Florida keys, -- Late at night I went walking through your difficult wood, -- They say, if you can tell, clasped tight under the blanket, -- There are days when I seem to have nothing -- Frost, burning. The city's ill. -- Pain made her conservative. -- Pierrot Le Fou. 1. Suppose you stood facing -- 2. On a screen as wide as this, I grope for the titles. -- 3. Suppose we had time -- 4. The island blistered our feet. -- 5. When I close my eyes -- 6. To record -- Letters: March 1969. 1. Foreknown. The victor -- 2. Hopes sparkle like water in the clean carafe. -- 3. "I am up at sunrise -- 4. Six months back -- Pieces. 1. Breakpoint -- 2. Relevance -- 3. Memory -- 4. Time and place -- 5. Revelation -- Our whole life -- Your letter -- Stand up -- The stelae -- Snow -- The will to change. 1. That Chinese restaurant was a joke -- 2. Knocked down in the canefield -- 3. Beardless again, phoning -- 4. At the wings of the mirror, peacock plumes -- 5. The cabdriver from the Bronx -- The photograph of the unmade bed -- Images for Godard. 1. Language as city:: Wittgenstein -- 2. To know the extremes of light -- 3. To love, to move perpetually -- 4. At the end of Alphaville -- 5. Interior monologue of the poet: -- A valediction forbidding mourning -- Shooting script. Part I: 11/69-2/70. 1. We were bound on the wheel of an endless conversation. -- 2. Ghazal V (adapted from Mirza Ghalib) -- 3. The old blanket. The crumbs of rubbed wool turning up. -- 4. In my imagination I was the pivot of a fresh beginning. -- 5. Of simple choice they are the villagers; ... -- 6. You are beside me like a wall; ... -- 7. Picking the wax to crumbs ... -- Part II: 3-7/70. 8. A woman waking behind grimed blinds ... -- 9. (Newsreel) -- 10. They come to you with their descriptions of your soul. -- 11. The mare's skeleton in the clearing: another sign of life. -- 12. I was looking for a way out of a lifetime's consolations. -- 13. We are driven to odd attempts; ... -- 14. Whatever it was: the grains of the glacier ...
Diving into the wreck (1971-1972). I. Trying to talk with a man -- When we dead awaken -- Waking in the dark -- Incipience -- After twenty years -- The mirror in which two are seen as one -- From the prison house -- The stranger -- Song -- Dialogue -- Diving into the wreck -- II. The phenomenology of anger -- III. Merced -- A primary ground -- Translations -- The ninth symphony of Beethoven understood at last as a sexual message -- Rape -- Burning oneself in -- Burning oneself out -- For a sister -- For the dead -- From a survivor -- August -- IV. Meditations for a savage child -- Poems (1973-1974). Dien bien phu -- Essential resources -- Blood-sister -- The wave -- Re-forming the crystal -- The fourth month of the landscape architect -- The alleged murderess walking in her cell -- White night -- Amnesia -- For L.G.: unseen for twenty years -- Family romance -- From an old house in America -- The fact of a doorframe
The dream of a common language (1974-1977). I. Power. Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev -- Origins and history of consciousness -- Splittings -- Hunger -- To a poet -- Cartographies of silence -- The lioness -- II. Twenty-one love poems. I. Wherever in this city, screens flicker -- II. I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming. -- III. Since we're not young, weeks have to do time -- IV. I come home from you through the early light of spring -- V. This apartment full of books could crack open -- VI. Your small hands, precisely equal to my own-- -- VII. What kind of beast would turn its life into words? -- VIII. I can see myself years back at Sunion, -- IX. our silence today is a pond where drowned things live -- X. Your dog, tranquil and innocent, dozes through -- XI. Every peak is a crater. This is the law of volcanoes, -- Xii. Sleeping, turning in turn like planets -- XIII. The rules break like a thermometer, -- XIV. It was your vision of the pilot -- (The floating poem, unnumbered) -- XV. If I lay on that beach with you -- XVI. Across a city from you, I'm with you, -- XVII. No one's fated or doomed to love anyone. -- XVIII. Rain on the West Side Highway, -- XIX. Can it be growing colder when I begin -- XX. That conversation we were always on the edge -- XXI. The dark lintels, the blue and foreign stones -- III. Not somewhere else, but here. Upper Broadway -- Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff -- Nights and days -- Sibling mysteries -- A woman dead in her forties -- Mother-right -- Natural resources -- Toward the solstice -- Transcendental etude
A wild patience has taken me this far (1978-1981). The images -- Coast to coast -- Integrity -- Culture and anarchy -- For Julia in Nebraska -- Transit -- For memory -- What is possible -- For Ethel Rosenberg -- Mother-in-law -- Heroines -- Grandmothers. 1. Mary Gravely Jones -- 2. Hattie Rice Rich -- 3. Granddaughter -- The spirit of place. I. Over the hills in Shutesbury, Leverett -- II. The mountain laurel in bloom -- III. Strangers are an endangered species -- IV. The river-fog will do for privacy -- V. Orion plunges like a drunken hunter -- Frame -- Rift -- A vision -- Turning the wheel. 1. Location -- 2. Burden baskets -- 3. Hohokam -- 4. Self-hatred -- 5. Particularity -- 6. Apparition -- 7. Mary Jane Colter, 1904 -- 8. Turning the wheel
Your native land, your life (1981-1985). I. Sources -- II. North American time. For the record -- Education of a novelist -- Virginia 1906 -- Dreams before waking -- When/then -- Upcountry -- One kind of terror: a love poem -- In the wake of home -- What was, is; what might have been, might be -- For an occupant -- Emily Carr -- Poetry: I -- Poetry: II, Chicago -- Poetry: III -- Baltimore: a fragment from the thirties -- New York -- Homage to winter -- Blue rock -- Yom Kippur 1984 -- Edges -- III. Contradictions: tracking poems. 1. Look: this is January the worst onslaught -- 2. Heart of cold. Bones of cold. Scalp of cold -- 3. My mouth hovers across your breasts -- 4. He slammed his hand across my face and I -- 5. She is carrying my madness and I dread her -- 6. Dear Adrienne: I'm calling you up tonight -- 7. Dear Adrienne, I feel signified by pain -- 8. I'm afraid of prison. Have been all these years. 9. Tearing but not yet town: this page -- 10. Night over the great and the little worlds -- 11. I came out of the hospital like a woman -- 12. Violence as purification: the one idea. -- 13. Trapped in one idea, you can't have your feelings, -- 14. Lately in my dreams I hear long sentences -- 15. You who think I find words for everything, -- 16. It's true, these last few years I've lived -- 17. I have backroads I take to places -- 18. The problem, unstated till now, is how -- 19. If to feel is to be unreliable -- 20. The tobacco fields lie fallow the migrant pickers -- 21. The cat-tails blaze in the corner sunflowers -- 22. In a bald skull sits our friend in a helmet -- 23. You know the government must have pushed them to settle, -- 24. Someone said to me: it's just that we don't -- 25. Did anyone ever know who we were -- 26. You: air-driven reft from the tuber-bitten soil -- 27. The Tolstoyans the Afro-American slaves -- 28. This high summer we love will pour its light -- 29. You who think I find words for everything
Time's power (1985-1988). Solfeggietto -- This -- Love poem -- Negotiations -- In a classroom -- The novel -- A story -- In memoriam: D.K. -- Children playing checkers at the edge of the forest -- Sleepwalking next to death -- Letters in the family -- The desert as garden of paradise -- Delta -- 6/21 -- For an album -- Dreamwood -- Walking down the road -- The slides -- Harpers Ferry -- One life -- Divisions of labor -- Living memory -- Turning -- An atlas of the difficult world (1988-1991). I. A dark woman, head bent, listening for something -- II. Here is a map of our country: -- III. Two five-pointed star-shaped glass candleholders, ... -- IV. Late summers, early autumns, you can see something that binds -- V. Catch if you can your country's moment, begin -- VI. A potato explodes in the oven. Poetry and famine: -- VII. (The dream-site) some rooftop, water-tank looming, street-racket strangely quelled -- VIII. He thought there would be a limit and that it would stop him. He depended on that: -- IX. One this earth, in this life, as I read your story, you're lonely. -- X. Soledad. =f. solitude, loneliness, homesickness; lonely retreat. -- XI. One night on Monterey Bay the death-freeze of the century: -- XII. What homage will be paid to a beauty built to last -- XIII. (Dedications) I know you are reading this poem -- II. She -- That mouth -- Olivia -- Eastern war time. 1. Memory lifts her smoky mirror: 1943, -- 2. Girl between home and school, what is that girl -- 3. How telegrams used to come: ring -- 4. What the grown-ups can't speak of would you push -- 5. A young girl knows she is young and meant to live -- 6. A girl wanders with a boy into the woods -- 7. A woman of sixty driving -- 8. A woman wired in memories -- 9. Streets closed, emptied by force guns at corners -- 10. Memory says: want to do right? Don't count on me -- Tattered Kaddish -- Through corralitos under rolls of cloud. II. Showering after 'flu; stripping the bed; -- III. If you know who died in that bed, do you know -- IV. That light of outrage is the light of history -- V. She who died on that bed sees it her way: -- For a friend in travail -- 1948: Jews -- Two arts. 1. I've redone you by daylight. -- 2. Raise it up there and it will -- Darklight. I. Early day. Grey the air. -- II. When heat leaves the walls at last -- Final notations
Dark fields of the republic (1991-1995). What kind of times are these. In those years -- To the days -- Miracle ice cream -- Rachel -- Amends -- Calle visión. 1. Not what you thought: just a turn-off -- 2. Calle visión-- 3. Lodged in the difficult hotel -- 4. Calle vision your heart beats on unbroken -- 5. Ammonia -- 6. The repetitive motions of slaughtering -- 7. You can call on beauty still and it will leap -- 8. In the room in the house -- 9. In the black net -- 10. On the road there is a house -- Reversion -- Revolution in permanence (1953, 1993) -- Then or now. Food packages: 1947 -- Innocence: 1945 -- Sunset, December, 1993 -- Deportations -- And now -- Sending love. Voice -- Sending love: Molly sends it -- Sending love is harmless -- Terrence years ago -- Take -- Late Ghazal -- Six narratives. 1. You drew up the story of your life -- 2. You drew up a story about me -- 3. You were telling a story about women to young men -- 4. You were telling a story about love -- 5. I was telling you a story about love -- 6. You were telling a story about war -- From pierced darkness -- Inscriptions. One: comrade -- Two: movement -- Three: origins -- Four: history -- Five: voices -- Six: edgelit -- Midnight salvage (1995-1998). The art of translation -- For an anniversary -- Midnight salvage -- Char -- Modotti -- Shattered head -- 1941 -- Letters to a young poet -- Camino real -- Plaza street and Flatbush -- Seven skins -- "The night has a thousand eyes" -- Rusted legacy -- A long conversation
Fox (1998-2000). Victory -- Veterans Day -- For this -- Regardless -- Signatures -- Nora's gaze -- Architect -- Fox -- Messages -- Fire -- Twilight -- Octobrish -- Second sight -- Grating -- Noctilucent clouds -- If your name is on the list -- 1999 -- Terza rima -- Four short poems -- Rauschenberg's bed -- Waiting for you at the mystery spot -- Ends of the Earth -- The school among the ruins (2000-2004). .I. Centaur's requiem -- Equinox -- Tell me -- For June, in the year 2001 -- The school among the ruins -- This evening let's -- Variations on lines from a Canadian poet -- Delivered clean -- The eye -- There is no one story and one story only -- II. USonian journals 2000 -- III. Territory shared. Address -- Transparencies -- Livresque -- Collaborations -- Ritual acts -- Point in time -- IV. Alternating current. Sometimes I'm back in that city -- No bad dreams. Night, the bed, the faint clockface. -- Take one, take two -- What's suffered in laughter in aroused afternoons -- A deluxe blending machine -- As finally by wind or grass -- When we are shaken out -- V. Memorize this -- The painter's house -- After Apollinaire and Brassens -- Slashes -- Trace elements -- Bract -- VI. Dislocations: seven scenarios. 1. Still learning the word -- 2. In a vast dystopic space the small things -- 3. City and world: this infection drinks like a drinker -- 4. For recalcitrancy of attitude -- 5. Faces in the mesh: defiance or disdain -- 6. Not to get up and go back to the drafting table -- 7. Tonight someone will sleep in a stripped apartment -- VII. Five o'clock, January 2003 -- Wait -- Don't take me -- To have written the truth -- Screen door -- VIII. Tendril
Telephone ringing in the labyrinth (2004-2006). I. Voyage to the denouement -- Skeleton key -- Wallpaper -- In plain sight -- Behind the motel -- Melancholy piano (extracts) -- II. Archaic -- Long after Stevens -- Improvisation on lines from Edwin Muir's "variations on a time theme" -- Rhyme -- Hotel -- Three elegies. I. Late style -- II. As ever -- III. Fallen figure -- Hubble photographs: after Sappho -- This is not the room -- Unknown quantity -- Tactile value -- Midnight, the same day. I. When the sun seals my eyes the emblem -- II. Try to rest now, says a voice -- Even then maybe -- Director's notes -- Rereading The dead lecturer -- III. Letters censored, shredded, returned to sender, or judged unfit to send -- IV. If/as though -- Time exposures. I. Glance into glittering moisture -- II. Is there a doctor in the house -- III. They'd say she was humorless -- IV. When I stretched out my legs beyond your wishful thinking -- V. You've got ocean through sheet glass brandy and firelog -- The university reopens as the floods recede -- Via insomnia -- A burning kangaroo -- Ever, again -- V. Draft #2006 -- VI. Telephone ringing in the labyrinth
Tonight no poetry will serve (2007-2010). I. Waiting for rain, for music -- Reading the Iliad (as if) for the first time -- Benjamin revisited -- Innocence -- Domain -- Fracture -- Turbulence -- Tonight no poetry will serve -- II. Scenes of negotiation -- III. From sickbed shores -- IV. Axel Avákar. Axel: a backstory -- Axel, in thunder -- I was there, Axel -- Axel, darkly seen, in a glass house -- V. Ballade of the poverties -- Emergency clinic -- Confrontations -- Circum/stances -- Winterface -- Quarto -- Don't flinch -- Black locket -- Generosity -- VI. You, again -- Powers of recuperation -- Later poems (2010-2012). Itinerary -- For the young anarchists -- Fragments of an opera -- Liberté -- Teethsucking bird -- Undesigned -- Suspended lines -- Tracings -- From strata -- Endpapers.
|
