Poetry Midterm Identification

Adrienne Rich "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers"

Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen, Bright topaz denizens of a world of green. They do not fear the men beneath the tree; They pace in sleek chivalric certainty. Aunt Jennifer's finger fluttering through her wool Find even the ivory needle hard to pull. The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand. When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by. The tigers in the panel that she made Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

James Dickey "The Sheep Child"

Farm boys wild to couple With anything with soft-wooded trees With mounds of earth mounds Of pinestraw will keep themselves off Animals by legends of their own: In the hay-tunnel dark And dung of barns, they will Say I have heard tell That in a museum in Atlanta Way back in a corner somewhere There's this thing that's only half Sheep like a woolly baby Pickled in alcohol because Those things can't live his eyes Are open but you can't stand to look I heard from somebody who... But this is now almost all Gone. Their boys have taken Their own true wives in the city, The sheep are safe in the west hill Pasture but we who were born there Still are not sure. Are we, Because we remember, remembered In the terrible dust of museums? Merely with his eyes, the sheep-child may Be saying saying

Allen Ginsberg "Spincter"

I hope my good old ******* holds out 60 years it's been mostly OK Tho in Bolivia a fissure operation survived the altiplano hospital--a little blood, no polyps, occasionally a small hemorrhoidactive, eager, receptive to phallus coke bottle, candle, carrot banana & fingers--Now AIDS makes it shy, but still eager to serve--out with the dumps, in with the condom'd orgasmic friend--still rubbery muscular, unashamed wide open for joy But another 20 years who knows, old folks got troubles everywhere--necks, prostates, stomachs, joints--Hope the old hole stays young till death, relax

Allen Ginsberg "A Supermarket in California"

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel? I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective. We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

Gwendolyn Brooks "The Vacant Lot"

Mrs. Coley's three-flat brick Isn't here any more. All done with seeing her fat little form Burst out of the basement door; And with seeing her African son-in-law (Rightful heir to the throne) With his great white strong cold squares of teeth And his little eyes of stone; And with seeing the squat fat daughter Letting in the men When majesty has gone for the day- And letting them out again.

Philip Larkin, "Church Going"

Once I am sure there's nothing going on I step inside, letting the door thud shut. Another church: matting, seats, and stone, And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff Up at the holy end; the small neat organ; And a tense, musty, unignorable silence, Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off My cycle-clips in awkward reverence, Move forward, run my hand around the font. From where I stand, the roof looks almost new-

Allen Ginsberg "Personal Ad"

Poet professor in autumn years seeks helpmate companion protector friend young lover w/ empty compassionate soul exuberant spirit, straightforward handsome athletic physique & boundless mind, courageous warrior who may also like women & girls, no problem, to share bed meditation apartment Lower East Side, help inspire mankind conquer world anger & guilt, empowered by Whitman Blake Rimbaud Ma Rainey & Vivaldi, familiar respecting Art's primordial majesty, priapic carefree playful harmless slave or master, mortally tender passing swift time, photographer, musician, painter, poet, yuppie or scholar--Find me here in New York alone with the Alone going to lady psychiatrist who says Make time in your life for someone you can call darling, honey, who holds you dear can get excited & lay his head on your heart in peace.

Robert Lowell, "For the Union Dead"

at the dedication, William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe. Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat. Its Colonel is as lean as a compass-needle. He has an angry wrenlike vigilance, a greyhound's gentle tautness; he seems to wince at pleasure, and suffocate for privacy. He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely, peculiar power to choose life and die- when he leads his black soldiers to death, he cannot bend his back. On a thousand small town New England greens, the old white churches hold their air of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic. The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier grow slimmer and younger each year- wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets and muse through their sideburns... Shaw's father wanted no monument except the ditch, where his son's body was thrown and lost with his "n******." The ditch is nearer. There are no statues for the last war her

Robert Hayden "Witch Doctor"

to give the knockout lick to your bad luck; say he's the holyweight champeen who's here to deal a knockout punch to your hard luck." Reposing on cushions of black leopard skin, he telephones instructions for a long slow drive across the park that burgeons now with spring and sailors. Peers questingly into the green fountainous twilight, sighs and turns the gold-plate dial to Music For Your Dining-Dancing Pleasure. Smoking Egyptian cigarettes rehearses in his mind a new device that he must use tonight. Approaching Israel Temple, mask in place, he hears ragtime allegros of a "Song of Zion" that becomes when he appears a hallelujah wave for him to walk. His mother and a rainbow-surpliced cordon conduct him choiring to the altar-stage, and there he kneels and seems to pray before a lighted Jesus painted sealskin-brown. Then with glittering flourish he arises, turns, gracefully extends his draperied arms: "Israelites, true Jews, O found lost tribe of Israel, receive my blessing

Robert Lowell "Commander Lowell"

when Lever Brothers offered to pay him double what the Navy paid. I nagged for his dress sword with gold braid, and cringed because Mother, new caps on all her teeth, was born anew at forty. With seamanlike celerity, Father left the Navy, and deeded Mother his property. He was soon fired. Year after year, he still hummed "Anchors aweigh" in the tub- whenever he left a job, he bought a smarter car. Father's last employer was Scudder, Stevens and Clark, Investment Advisors, himself his only client. While Mother dragged to bed alone, read Menninger, and grew more and more suspicious, he grew defiant. Night after night, a la clarté deserte de sa lampe, he slid his ivory Annapolis slide rule across a pad of graphs- piker speculations! In three years he squandered sixty thousand dollars. Smiling on all, Father was once successful enough to be lost in the mob of ruling-class Bostonians. As early as 1928, he owned a house converted to oil, and redecorated by the architect of St. Mar

Robert Lowell "Grandparents"

where Grandpa, dipping sugar for us both, once spilled his demitasse. His favorite ball, the number three, still hides the coffee stain. Never again to walk there, chalk our cues, insist on shooting for us both. Grandpa! Have me, hold me, cherish me! Tears smut my fingers. There I hold an Illustrated London News-; disloyal still, I doodle handlebar mustaches on the last Russian Czar.

Allen Ginsberg "Howl"

who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles, who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation, who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity, who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes, who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second, who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz, who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave, who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury, who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy

Robert Hayden "Middle Passage"

"That Crew and Captain lusted with the comeliest of the savage girls kept naked in the cabins; that there was one they called The Guinea Rose and they cast lots and fought to lie with her: "That when the Bo's'n piped all hands, the flames spreading from starboard already were beyond control, the negroes howling and their chains entangled with the flames: "That the burning blacks could not be reached, that the Crew abandoned ship, leaving their shrieking negresses behind, that the Captain perished drunken with the wenches: "Further Deponent sayeth not." Pilot Oh Pilot Me Aye, lad, and I have seen those factories, Gambia, Rio Pongo, Calabar; have watched the artful mongos baiting traps of war wherein the victor and the vanquished Were caught as prizes for our barracoons. Have seen the n***** kings whose vanity and greed turned wild black hides of Fellatah, Mandingo, Ibo, Kru to gold for us. And there was one-King Anthracite we named him- fetish face beneath French para

Elizabeth Bishop "The Fish"

-It was more like the tipping of an object toward the light. I admired his sullen face, the mechanism of his jaw, and then I saw that from his lower lip -if you could call it a lip- grim, wet, and weaponlike, hung five old pieces of fish-line, or four and a wire leader with the swivel still attached, with all their five big hooks grown firmly in his mouth. A green line, frayed at the end where he broke it, two heavier lines, and a fine black thread still crimped from the strain and snap when it broke and he got away. Like medals with their ribbons frayed and wavering, a five-haired beard of wisdom trailing from his aching jaw. I stared and stared and victory filled up the little rented boat, from the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, the sun-cracked thwarts, the oarlocks on their strings, the gunnels - until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go.

Amy Clampitt "Beethoven, Opus 111"

-Or, conversely, hungers for the levitations of the concert hall: the hands like rafts of putti out of a region where the dolorous stars are fixed in glassy cerements of Art; the ancien regime's diaphanous plash athwart the mounting throb of hobnails- shod squadrons of vibration mining the air, its struck ores hardening into a plowshare, a downward wandering disrupting every formal symmetry: from the supine harp-case, the strung-foot tendons under the mahogany, the bulldozer in the bass unearths a Piranesian catacomb: Beethoven ventilating, with a sound he cannot hear, the cave-in of recurring rage. In the tornado country of mid-America, my father might have been his twin-a farmer hacking at sourdock, at the strangle- roots of thistles and wild morning glories, setting out rashly, one October, to rid the fencerows of poison ivy: livid seed-globs turreted in trinities of glitter, ripe with the malefic glee no farmer doubts lives deep down things. My father was naive enough-by

Robert Lowell "Skunk Hour"

A car radio bleats, "Love, O careless Love...." I hear my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, as if my hand were at its throat.... I myself am hell; nobody's here- only skunks, that search in the moonlight for a bite to eat. They march on their soles up Main Street: white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire under the chalk-dry and spar spire of the Trinitarian Church. I stand on top of our back steps and breathe the rich air- a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail. She jabs her wedge-head in a cup of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail, and will not scare.

Elizabeth Bishop "Crusoe in England"

A new volcano has erupted, the papers say, and last week I was reading where some ship saw an island being born: at first a breath of steam, ten miles away; and then a black fleck-basalt, probably- rose in the mate's binoculars and caught on the horizon like a fly. They named it. But my poor old island's still un-rediscovered, un-renamable. None of the books has ever got it right. Well, I had fifty-two miserable, small volcanoes I could climb with a few slithery strides- volcanoes dead as ash heaps. I used to sit on the edge of the highest one and count the others standing up, naked and leaden, with their heads blown off. I'd think that if they were the size I thought volcanoes should be, then I had become a giant; and if I had become a giant, I couldn't bear to think what size the goats and turtles were, or the gulls, or the overlapping rollers -a glittering hexagon of rollers closing and closing in, but never quite, glittering and glittering, though the sky was mostly

Elizabeth Bishop "At the Fishhouses"

Although it is a cold evening, down by one of the fishhouses an old man sits netting, his net, in the gloaming almost invisible, a dark purple-brown, and his shuttle worn and polished. The air smells so strong of codfish it makes one's nose run and one's eyes water.

Allen Ginsberg "America"

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing. America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956. I can't stand my own mind. America when will we end the human war? Go **** yourself with your atom bomb. I don't feel good don't bother me. I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind. America when will you be angelic? When will you take off your clothes? When will you look at yourself through the grave? When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites? America why are your libraries full of tears? America when will you send your eggs to India? I'm sick of your insane demands. When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks? America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world. Your machinery is too much for me. You made me want to be a saint. There must be some other way to settle this argument. Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister. Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke? I'm trying to come to the point. I refuse to give up my obsession. America stop pushing I know what I'm doing. America the plum blossoms are falling. I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder. America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies. America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I'm not sorry. I smoke marijuana every chance I get. I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet. When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid. My mind is made up there's going to be trouble. You should have seen me reading Marx. My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right. I won't say the Lord's Prayer. I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations. America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia. I

Allen Ginsberg "America"

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood? I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they're all different sexes. America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe America free Tom Mooney America save the Spanish Loyalists America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die America I am the Scottsboro boys. America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother Bloor the Silk-strikers' Ewig-Weibliche made me cry I once saw the Yiddish orator Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy. America you don't really want to go to war. America its them bad Russians. Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians. The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages. Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations. That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black ******s. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help. America this is quite serious. America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set. America is this correct? I'd better get right down to the job. It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway. America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Allen Ginsberg "America"

Asia is rising against me. I haven't got a chinaman's chance. I'd better consider my national resources. My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that jetplanes 1400 miles an hour and twentyfive-thousand mental institutions. I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns. I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go. My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

Robert Hayden, "Homage to the Empress of the Blues"

Because there was a man somewhere in a candystripe silk shirt, gracile and dangerous as a jaguar and because a woman moaned for him in sixty-watt gloom and mourned him Faithless Love Twotiming Love Oh Love Oh Careless Aggravating Love, She came out on the stage in yards of pearls, emerging like a favorite scenic view, flashing her golden smile and sang. Because grey laths began somewhere to show from underneath torn hurdygurdy lithographs of dollfaced heaven; and because there were those who feared alarming fists of snow on the door and those who feared the riot-squad of statistics, She came out on the stage in ostrich feather, beaded satin, and shone that smile on us and sang.

Allen Ginsberg "Howl"

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland where you're madder than I am I'm with you in Rockland where you must feel very strange I'm with you in Rockland where you imitate the shade of my mother I'm with you in Rockland where you've murdered your twelve secretaries I'm with you in Rockland where you laugh at this invisible humor I'm with you in Rockland where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter I'm with you in Rockland where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio I'm with you in Rockland where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses I'm with you in Rockland where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica I'm with you in Rockland where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx I'm with you in Rockland where you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss I'm with you in Rockland where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse I'm with you in Rockland where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void I'm with you in Rockland where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha I'm with you in Rockland where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb I'm with you in Rockland where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale I'm with you in Rockland where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep

Philip Larkin, "Church Going"

Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don't. Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce 'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant. The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence. Reflect the place was not worth stopping for. Yet stop I did: in fact I often do, And always end much at a loss like this, Wondering what to look for; wondering, too, When churches fall completely out of use What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep A few cathedrals chronically on show, Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases, And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep. Shall we avoid them as unlucky places? Or, after dark, will dubious women come To make their children touch a particular stone; Pick simples for a cancer; or on some Advised night see walking a dead one? Power of some sort or other will go on In games, in riddles, seemingly at random; But superstition, like belief, must die, And what re

Robert Hayden "Middle Passage"

Deep in the festering hold thy father lies, of his bones New England pews are made, those are altar lights that were his eyes. Jesus Saviour Pilot Me Over Life's Tempestuous Sea We pray that Thou wilt grant, O Lord, safe passage to our vessels bringing heathen souls unto Thy chastening. Jesus Saviour "8 bells. I cannot sleep, for I am sick with fear, but writing eases fear a little since still my eyes can see these words take shape upon the page & so I write, as one would turn to exorcism. 4 days scudding, but now the sea is calm again. Misfortune follows in our wake like sharks (our grinning tutelary gods). Which one of us has killed an albatross? A plague among have jettisoned the blind to no avail. It spreads, the terrifying sickness spreads. Its claws have scratched sight from the Capt.'s eyes & there is blindness in the fo'c'sle & we must sail 3 weeks before we come to port." What port awaits us, Davy Jones' or home? I've heard of slavers drifting, drifting, playth

Adrienne Rich "Grandmothers"

Easier to encapsulate your lives in a slide-show of impressions given and taken, to play the child or victim, the projectionist, easier to invent a script for each of you, myself still at the center, than to write words in which you might have found yourselves, looked up at me and said "Yes, I was like that; but I was something more...." Danville, Virginia; Vicksburg, Mississippi; the "war between the states" a living memory its aftermath the plague-town closing its gates, trying to cure itself with poisons. I can almost touch that little town.... a little white town rimmed with Negroes, making a deep shadow on the whiteness. Born a white woman, Jewish or of curious mind -twice an outsider, still believing in inclusion- in those defended hamlets of half-truth broken in two by one strange idea, "Blood" the all-powerful, awful theme- what were the lessons to be learned? If I believe the daughter of one of you - Amnesia was the answer.

Robert Lowell "Waking Early Sunday Morning"

Fierce, fireless mind, running downhill. Look up and see the harbor fill: business as usual in eclipse goes down to the sea in ships- wake of refuse, dacron rope, bound for Bermuda or Good Hope, all bright before the morning watch the wine-dark hulls of yawl and ketch. I watched a glass of water wet with a fine fuzz of icy sweat, silvery colors touched with sky, serene in their neutrality- yet if I shift, or change my mood, I see some object made of wood, background behind it of brown grain, to darken it, but not to stain. O that the spirit could remain tinged but untarnished by its strain! Better dressed and stacking birch, or lost with the Faithful at Church- anywhere, but somewhere else! And now the new electric bells, clearly chiming "Faith of our fathers," and now the congregation gathers. O Bible chopped and crucified in hymns we hear but do not read, none of the milder subtleties of grace or art will sweeten these stiff quatrains shoveled out four-square- they sing o

Adrienne Rich "Diving into the Wreck"

First having read the book of myths,and loaded the camera,and checked the edge of the knife-blade,I put onthe body-armor of black rubberthe absurd flippersthe grave and awkward mask.I am having to do thisnot like Cousteau with hisassiduous teamaboard the sun-flooded schoonerbut here alone. There is a ladder.The ladder is always therehanging innocentlyclose to the side of the schooner.We know what it is for,we who have used it.Otherwiseit is a piece of maritime flosssome sundry equipment. I go down.Rung after rung and stillthe oxygen immerses methe blue lightthe clear atomsof our human air.I go down.My flippers cripple me,I crawl like an insect down the ladderand there is no oneto tell me when the oceanwill begin. First the air is blue and thenit is bluer and then green and thenblack I am blacking out and yetmy mask is powerfulit pumps my blood with powerthe sea is another storythe sea is not a question of powerI have to learn aloneto turn my body without forcein the deep element. And now: it is easy to forgetwhat I came foramong so many who have alwayslived hereswaying their crenellated fansbetween the reefsand besidesyou breathe differently down here. I came to explore the wreck.The words are purposes.The words are maps.I came to see the damage that was doneand the treasures that prevail.I stroke the beam of my lampslowly along the flankof something more permanentthan fish or weed the thing I came for:the wreck and not the story of the wreckthe thing itself and not the myththe drowned face always staringtoward the sunthe evidence of damageworn by salt and sway into this threadbare beautythe ribs of the disastercurving their assertionamong the tentative haunters.

Robert Hayden "Witch Doctor"

He dines alone surrounded by reflections of himself. Then after sleep and benzedrine descends the Cinquecento stair his magic wrought from hypochondria of the well- to-do and nagging deathwish of the poor; swirls on smiling genuflections of his liveried chauffeur into a crested lilac limousine, the cynosure of mousey neighbors tittering behind Venetian blinds and half afraid of him and half admiring his outrageous flair. Meanwhile his mother, priestess in gold lame, precedes him to the quondam theater now Israel Temple of the Highest Alpha, where the bored, the sick, the alien, the tired await euphoria. With deadly vigor she prepares the way for mystery and lucre. Shouts in blues-contralto, "He's God's dictaphone of all-redeeming truth. Oh he's the holyweight champeen who's come

Gwendolyn Brooks "Of De Witt Williams"

He was born in Alabama. He was bred in Illinois. He was nothing but a Plain black boy. Swing low swing low sweet sweet chariot. Nothing but a plain black boy. Drive him past the Pool Hall. Drive him past the Show. Blind within his casket, But maybe he will know. Down through Forty-seventh Street: Underneath the L, And-Northwest Corner, Prairie, That he loved so well. Don't forget the Dance Halls- Warwick and Savoy, Where he picked his women, where He drank his liquid joy. Born in Alabama. Bred in Illinois. He was nothing but a Plain black boy. Swing low swing low sweet sweet chariot. Nothing but a plain black boy.

Elizabeth Bishop "The Man-Moth"

Here, above, cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight. The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat. It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on, And he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon. He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties, feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold, of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers. But when the Man-Moth pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface, the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings. He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky, proving the sky quite useless for protection. He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb. Up the facades, his shadow dragging like a photographer's cloth behind him, he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage to push his small head throu

James Dickey "The Sheep Child"

I am here, in my father's house. I who am half of your world, came deeply To my mother in the long grass Of the west pasture, where she stood like moonlight Listening for foxes. It was something like love From another world that seized her From behind, and she gave, not lifting her head Out of dew, without ever looking, her best Self to that great need. Turned loose, she dipped her face Farther into the chill of the earth, and in a sound Of sobbing of something stumbling Away, began, as she must do, To carry me. I woke, dying, In the summer sun of the hillside, with my eyes Far more than human. I saw for a blazing moment The great grassy world from both sides, Man and beast in the round of their need, And the hill wind stirred in my wool, My hoof and my hand clasped each other, I ate my one meal Of milk, and died Staring. From dark grass I came straight To my father's house, whose dust Whirls up in the halls for no reason When no one comes piling deep in a hellish mild corner, And,

Elizabeth Bishop "The Fish"

I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in the corner of his mouth. He didn't fight. He hadn't fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and homely. Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper, and its pattern of darker brown was like wallpaper: shapes like full-blown roses stained and lost through age. He was speckled with barnacles, fine rosettes of lime, and infested with tiny white sea-lice, and underneath two or three rags of green weed hung down. While his gills were breathing in the terrible oxygen -the frightening gills, fresh and crisp with blood, that can cut so badly- I thought of the coarse white flesh packed in like feathers, the big bones and the little bones, the dramatic reds and blacks of his shiny entrails, and the pink swim-bladder like a big peony. I looked into his eyes which were far larger than mine but shallower, and yellowed, the irises backed and packed

Elizabeth Bishop "Crusoe in England"

I got so tired of the very colors! One day I dyed a baby goat bright red with my red berries, just to see something a little different. And then his mother wouldn't recognize him. Dreams were the worst. Of course I dreamed of food and love, but they were pleasant rather than otherwise. But then I'd dream of things like slitting a baby's throat, mistaking it for a baby goat. I'd have nightmares of other islands stretching away from mine, infinities of islands, islands spawning islands, like frogs' eggs turning into polliwogs on each and every one, eventually, for ages, registering their flora, their fauna, their geography. Just when I thought I couldn't stand it another minute longer, Friday came. (Accounts of that have everything all wrong.) Friday was nice. Friday was nice, and we were friends. If only he had been a woman! I wanted to propagate my kind, and so did he, I think, poor boy. He'd pet the baby goats sometimes, and race with them, or carry one around. -Pretty

James Dickey "The Hospital Window"

I have just come down from my father. Higher and higher he lies Above me in a blue light Shed by a tinted window. I drop through six white floors And then step out onto pavement. Still feeling my father ascend, I start to cross the firm street, My shoulder blades shining with all The glass the huge building can raise. Now I must turn round and face it, And know his one pane from the others. Each window possesses the sun As though it burned there on a wick. I wave, like a man catching fire. All the deep-dyed windowpanes flash, And, behind them, all the white rooms They turn to the color of Heaven. Ceremoniously, gravely, and weakly, Dozens of pale hands are waving Back, from inside their flames. Yet one pure pan among these Is the bright, erased blankness of nothing. I know that my father is there, In the shape of his death still living. The traffic increases around me Like a madness called down on my head. The horns blast at me like shotguns, And drivers lean out, driven crazy- But n

Allen Ginsberg "Howl"

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall, who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls, incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between

Elizabeth Bishop "The End of March"

I wanted to get as far as my proto-dream-house, my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box set up on pilings, shingled green, a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener (boiled with bicarbonate of soda?), protected from spring tides by a palisade of-are they railroad ties? (Many things about this place are dubious.) I'd like to retire there and do nothing, or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms: look through binoculars, read boring books, old, long, long books, and write down useless notes, talk to myself, and, foggy days, watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light. At night, a grog a l'americaine. I'd blaze it with a kitchen match and lovely diaphanous blue flame would waver, doubled in the window. There must be a stove; there is a chimney, askew, but braced with wires, and electricity, possibly -at least, at the back another wire limply leashes the whole affair to something off behind the dunes. A light to read by-perfect! But-impossible. And that day the wind was

Elizabeth Bishop "In the Waiting Room"

I was saying it to stop the sensation of falling off the round, turning world into cold, blue-black space. But I felt: you are an I, you are an Elizabeth, you are one of them. Why should you be one, too? I scarcely dared to look to see what it was I was. I gave a sidelong glance -I couldn't look any higher- at shadowy gray knees, trousers and skirts and boots and different pairs of hands lying under the lamps. I knew that nothing stranger had ever happened, that nothing stranger ever could happen. Why should I be my aunt, or me, or anyone? What similarities- boots, hands, the family voice I felt in my throat, or even the National Geographic and those awful hanging breasts- held us all together or made us all just one? How-I didn't know any word for it - how "unlikely"... How had I come to be here, like them, and overhear a cry of pain that could have got loud and worse but hadn't? The waiting room was bright and too hot. It was sliding beneath a big black wave, an

Allen Ginsberg "Howl"

I'm with you in Rockland where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we're free I'm with you in Rockland in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

Gwendolyn Brooks "A Song in the Front Yard"

I've stayed in the front yard all my life. I want to peek at the back Where it's rough and untended and hungry weed grows. A girl gets sick of a rose. I want to go in the back yard now And maybe down the alley, To where the charity children play. I want a good time today. They do some wonderful things. They have some wonderful fun. My mother sheets, but I say it's fine How they don't have to go in at quarter to nine. My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae Will grow up to be a bad woman. That George'll be taken to Jail soon or late (On account of last winter he sold our back gate.) But I say it's fine. Honest, I do. And I'd like to be a bad woman, too, And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace And strut down the streets with paint on my face.

Philip Larkin "Water"

If I were called in To construct a religion I should make use of water. Going to church Would entail a fording To dry, different clothes; My liturgy would employ Images of sousing, A furious devout drench, And I should raise in the east A glass of water Where any-angled light Would congregate endlessly.

Elizabeth Bishop "In the Waiting Room"

In Worcester, Massachusetts, I went with Aunt Consuelo to keep her dentist's appointment and sat and waited for her in the dentist's waiting room. It was winter. It got dark early. The waiting room was full of grown-up people, arctics and overcoats, lamps and magazines. My aunt was inside what seemed like a long time and while I waited I read

James Wright "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio"

In the Shreve High football stadium, I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville, And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood, And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel, Dreaming of heroes. All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home, Their women cluck like starved pullets, Dying for love. Therefore, Their sons grow suicidally beautiful At the beginning of October, And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

Philip Larkin, "Church Going"

It pleases me to stand in silence here; A serious house on serious earth it is, In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, Are recognised, and robed as destinies. And that much never can be obsolete, Since someone will forever be surprising A hunger in himself to be more serious, And gravitating with it to this ground, Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in, If only that so many dead lie round.

Elizabeth Bishop "The End of March"

It was cold and windy, scarcely the day to take a walk on that long beach. Everything was withdrawn as far as possible, indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken, seabirds in ones or twos. The rackety, icy, offshore wind numbed our faces on one side; disrupted the formation of a lone flight of Canada geese; and blew back the low, inaudible rollers in upright, steely mist. The sky was darker than the water -it was the color of mutton-fat jade. Along the wet sand, in rubber boots, we followed a track of big dog-prints (so big they were more like lion-prints). Then we came on lengths and lengths, endless, of wet white string, looping up to the tide-line, down to the water, over and over. Finally, they did end: a thick white snarl, man-size, awash, rising on every wave, a sodden ghost, falling back, sodden, giving up the ghost... A kite string? - But no kite.

Robert Hayden "Middle Passage"

Jesus, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy: Sails flashing to the wind like weapons, sharks following the moans the fever and the dying; horror the corposant and compass rose. Middle Passage: voyage through death to life upon these shores. "10 April 1800- Blacks rebellious. Crew uneasy. Our linguist says their moaning is a prayer for death, ours and their own. Some try to starve themselves. Lost three this morning leaped with crazy laughter to the waiting sharks, sang as they went under." Desire, Adventure, Tartar, Ann Standing to America, bringing home black gold, black ivory, black seed.

Adrienne Rich "Power"

Living in the earth-deposits of our history Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earthone bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-oldcure for fever or melancholy a tonicfor living on this earth in the winters of this climate. Today I was reading about Marie Curie:she must have known she suffered from radiation sicknessher body bombarded for years by the elementshe had purifiedIt seems she denied to the endthe source of the cataracts on her eyesthe cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-endstill she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil She died a famous woman denyingher woundsdenyingher wounds came from the same source as her power.

Gwendolyn Brooks "Sadie and Maud"

Maud went to college. Sadie stayed at home. Sadie scraped life With a fine-tooth comb. She didn't leave a tangle in. Her comb found every strand. Sadie was one of the livingest chits In all the land. Sadie bore two babies Under her maiden name. Maud and Ma and Papa Nearly died of shame. Every one but Sadie Nearly died of shame. When Sadie said her last so-long Her girls struck out from home. (Sadie had left as heritage Her fine-tooth comb.) Maud, who went to college, Is a thin brown mouse. She is living all alone In this old house.

Philip Larkin "The Whitsun Weddings"

More promptly out next time, more curiously, And saw it all again in different terms: The fathers with broad belts under their suits And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat; An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms, The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes, The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that Marked off the girls unreally from the rest. Yes, from cafes And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days Were coming to an end. All down the line Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round; The last confetti and advice were thrown, And, as we moved, each face seemed to define Just what it saw departing: children frowned At something dull; fathers had never known Success so huge and wholly farcical; The women shared The secret like a happy funeral; While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared At a religious wounding. Free at last, And loaded with the sum of all they saw, We hurried towards London, shuffling goats of steam. Now fi

Amy Clampitt "A Procession at Candlemas"

Moving on or going back to where you came from, bad news is what you mainly travel with: a breakup or a breakdown, someone running off or walking out, called up or called home: death in the family. Nudged from their stanchions outside the terminal, anonymous of purpose as a flock of birds, the bison of the highway funnel westward onto Route 80, mirroring an entity that cannot look into itself and know what makes it what it is. Sooner or later every trek becomes a funeral procession. The mother curtained in Intensive Care- a scene the mind leaves blank, fleeing instead toward scenes of transhumance, the belled sheep moving up the Pyrenees, red-tassled pack llamas footing velvet-green precipices, the Kurdish women, jingling with bangles, gorgeous on their rug-piled mounts-already lying dead, bereavement altering the moving lights to a processional, a feast of Candlemas. Change as a child-bearing, birth as a kind of shucking off: out of what began as a Mosaic insult-such a loathing

Robert Lowell "Skunk Hour"

Nautilus Island's hermit 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 for the hierarchic privacy of Queen Victoria's century, she buys up all the eyesores facing her shore, and lets them fall. The season's ill- we've lost our summer millionaire, who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean catalogue. His nine-knot yawl was auctioned off to lobstermen. A red fox stain covers Blue Hill. And now our fairy decorator brightens his shop for fall; his fishnet's filled with orange cork, orange, his cobbler's bench and awl; there is no money in his work, he'd rather marry. One dark night, my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull; I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down, they lay together, hull to hull, where the graveyard shelves on the town.... My mind's not right.

Robert Lowell "Waking Early Sunday Morning"

O to break loose, like the chinook salmon jumping and falling back, nosing up to the impossible stone and bone-crushing waterfall- raw-jawed, weak-fleshed there, stopped by ten steps of the roaring ladder, and then to clear the top on the last try, alive enough to spawn and die. Stop, back off. The salmon breaks water, and now my body wakes to feel the unpolluted joy and criminal leisure of a boy- no rainbow smashing a dry fly in the white run is free as I, here squatting like a dragon on time's hoard before the day's begun! Vermin run for their unstopped holes; in some dark nook a fieldmouse rolls a marble, hours on end, then stops; the termite in the woodwork sleeps- listen, the creatures of the night obsessive, casual, sure of foot, go on grinding, while the sun's daily remorseful blackout dawns.

Robert Lowell, "Memories of West Street and Lepke"

Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning, I hog a whole house on Boston's "hardly passionate Marlborough Street," where even the man scavenging 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 am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime? I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O., and made my manic statement, telling off the state and president, and then sat waiting sentence in the bull pen beside a Negro boy with curlicues of marijuana in his hair. Given a year, I walked on the roof of the West Street Jail, a short enclosure like my school soccer court, and saw the Hudson River once a day through sooty clothesline entanglements and bleaching khaki tenements. Strolling, I yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz,

James Wright "Lying on a Hammock on William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota"

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly, Asleep on the black trunk, Blowing like a leaf in green shadow. Down the ravine behind the empty house, The cowbells follow one another Into the distances of the afternoon. To my right, In a field of sunlight between two pines, The droppings of last year's horses Blaze up into golden stones. I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on. A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. I have wasted my life.

Allen Ginsberg "Howl"

Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind, who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo, who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox, who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge, a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon, yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars, whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement, who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall, suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room, who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts, who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night, who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibra

Robert Lowell "Waking Early Sunday Morning"

Pity the planet, all joy gone from this sweet volcanic cone; peace to our children when they fall in small war on the heels of small war-until the end of time to police the earth, a ghost orbiting forever lost in our monotonous sublime.

James Dickey "Buckdancer's Choice"

So I would hear out those lungs, The air split into nine levels, Some gift of tongues of the whistler In the invalid's bed: my mother, Warbling all day to herself The thousand variations of one song; It is called Buckdancer's Choice. For years, they have all been dying Out, the classic buck-and-wing men Of traveling minstrel shows; With them also an old woman Was dying of breathless angina, Yet still found breath enough To whistle up in my head A sight like a one-man band, Freed black, with cymbals at heel, An ex-slave who thrivingly danced To the ring of his own clashing light Through the thousand variations of one song All day to my mother's prone music, The invalid's warbler's note, While I crept close to the wall Sock-footed, to hear the sounds alter, Her tongue like a mockingbird's break Through stratum after stratum of a tone Proclaiming what choices there are For the last dancers of their kind, For ill women and for all slaves Of death, and children enchanted at wall

Philip Larkin "The Whitsun Weddings"

Stood ready to be loosed with all the power That being changed can give. We slowed again, And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

Robert Hayden "Those Winter Sundays"

Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he'd call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house, Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love's austere and lonely offices?

Gwendolyn Brooks, "We Real Cool"

THE POOL PLAYERS. SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL. We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.

Philip Larkin "The Whitsun Weddings"

That Witsun, I was late getting away: Not till about One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out, All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense Of being in a hurry gone. We ran Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence The river's level drifting breadth began, Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet. All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept For miles inland, A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept. Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and Canals with floatings of industrial froth; A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped And rose: and now and then a smell of grass Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth Until the next town, new and nondescript, Approached with acres of dismantled cars. At first, I didn't notice what a noise The weddings made Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys The interest of what's happening in the shade, And down the long cool platforms

James Dickey "The Hospital Window"

That the dying may float without fear In the bold blue gaze of my father. Slowly I move to the sidewalk With my pin-tingling hand half dead At the end of my bloodless arm. I carry it off in amazement. High, still higher, still waving, My recognized face fully mortal, Yet not; not at all, in the pale, Drained, otherworldly, stricken, Created hue of stained glass. I have just come down from my father.

Elizabeth Bishop "One Art"

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. -Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop "At the Fishhouses"

The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up to storerooms in the gables for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on. All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea, swelling slowly as if considering spilling over, is opaque, but the silver of the benches, the lobster pots, and masts, scattered among the wild jagged rocks, is of an apparent translucence like the small old buildings with an emerald moss growing on their shoreward walls. The big fish tubs are completely lined with layers of beautiful herring scales and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered with creamy iridescent coats of mail, with small iridescent flies crawling on them. Up on the little slope behind the horses, set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass, is an ancient wooden capstan, cracked, with two long bleached handles and some melancholy stains, like dried blood, where the ironwork has rusted. The old man accepts a Lucky Strike. He was a friend of my grandfather. We ta

Elizabeth Bishop "Crusoe in England"

The folds of lava, running out to sea, would hiss. I'd turn. And then they'd prove to be more turtles. The beaches were all lava, variegated, black, red, and white, and gray; the marbled colors made a fine display. And I had waterspouts. Oh, half a dozen at a time, far out, they'd come and go, advancing and retreating, their heads in cloud, their feet in moving patches of scuffed-up white. Glass chimneys, flexible, attenuated, sacerdotal beings of glass...I watched the water spiral up in them like smoke. Beautiful, yes, but not much company. I often gave way to self-pity. "Do I deserve this? I suppose I must. I wouldn't be here otherwise. Was there a moment when I actually chose this? I don't remember, but there could have been." What's wrong about self-pity, anyway? With my legs dangling down familiarly over a crater's edge, I told myself "Pity should begin at home." So the more pity I felt, the more I felt at home. The sun set in the sea; the same odd sun rose f

Robert Lowell, "Waking in the Blue"

The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore, rouses from the mare's-nest of his drowsy head propped on The Meaning of Meaning. He catwalks down our corridor. Azure day makes my agonized blue window bleaker. Crows maunder on the petrified fairway. Absence! My heart grows tense as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill. (This is the house for the "mentally ill.") What use is my sense of humor? I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties, once a Harvard all-American fullback (if such were possible!), still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties, as he soaks, a ramrod with the muscle of a seal in his long tub, vaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing. A kingly granite profile in a crimson golf cap, worn all day, all night, he thinks only of his figure, of slimming on sherbet and ginger ale- more cut off from words than a seal. This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean's; the hooded night lights bring out "Bobbie," Porcellian '29 a replica of Louis XVI with

Robert Lowell, "For the Union Dead"

The old South Boston Aquarium stands in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded. The bronze weathervane cod had lost half its scales. The airy tanks are dry. Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass; my hand tingled to burst the bubbles drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish. My hand draws back. I often sigh still for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom of the fish and reptile. One morning last March, I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage, yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting as they cropped up tons of mush and grass to gouge their underworld garage. Parking spaces luxuriate like civic sandpiles in the heart of Boston. A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders braces the tingling Statehouse, shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief, propped by a plank splint against the garage's earth

Philip Larkin "Reasons for Attendance"

The trumpet's voice, loud and authoritative, Draws me a moment to the lighted glass To watch the dancers-all under twenty-five- Shifting intently, face to flushed face, Solemnly on the beat of happiness. -Or so I fancy, sensing the smoke and sweat, The wonderful feel of girls. Why be out here? But then, why be in there? Sex, yes, but what Is sex? Surely, to think the lion's share Of happiness is found by couples-sheer Inaccuracy, as far as I'm concerned. What calls me is that lifted, rough-tongued bell (Art, if you like) whose individual sound Insists I too am individual. It speaks; I hear; others may hear as well, But not for me, nor I for them; and so With happiness. Therefore I stay outside, Believing this; and they maul to and fro, Believing that; and both are satisfied, If no one has misjudged himself. Or lied.

Elizabeth Bishop "The Man-Moth"

Then he returns, to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits, he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly. The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed, without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort. He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards. Each night he must be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams. Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window, for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison, runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers. If you catch him, hold up a flashlight to his eye. It's all dark pupil, an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids

Robert Lowell "Commander Lowell"

There was no undesirables or girls in my set, when I was a boy at Mattapoisett- only Mother, still her Father's daughter. Her voice was still electric with a hysterical, unmarried panic, when she read to me from the Napoleon book. Long-nosed Marie Louise Hapsburg in the frontispiece had a downright Boston bashfulness, where she groveled to Bonaparte, who scratched his navel, and bolted his food-just my seven years tall! And I, bristling and manic, skulked in the attic, and got two hundred French generals by name, from A to V-from Augereau to Vandamme. I used to dope myself asleep, naming those unpronounceables like sheep. Having a naval officer for my Father was nothing to shout about to the summer colony at "Matt." He wasn't at all "serious," when he showed up on the golf course, wearing a blue serge jacket and numbly cut white ducks he'd bought at a Pearl Harbor commissariat... and took four shots with his putter to sink his putt. "Bob," they said, "golf's

Philip Larkin, "This Be The Verse"

They **** you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. But they were ****ed up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another's throats. Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don't have any kids yourself.

Allen Ginsberg "Howl"

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us! Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit! Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time! Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

Robert Lowell "Grandparents"

They're altogether otherworldly now, those adults champing for their ritual Friday spin to pharmacist and five-and-ten in Brockton. Back in my throw-away and shaggy span of adolescence, Grandpa still waves his stick like a policeman; Grandmother, like a Mohammedan, still wears her thick lavender mourning and touring veil, the Pierce Arrow clears its throat in a horse stall. Then the dry road dust rises to whiten the fatigued elm leaves- the nineteenth century, tired of children, is gone. They're all gone into a world of light; the farm's my own. The farm's my own! Back there alone, I keep indoors, and spoil another season. I hear the rattly little country gramophone racking its five foot horn: "O Summer Time!" Even at noon here the formidable Ancien Regime still keeps nature at a distance. Five green shaded light bulbs spider the billiards-table; no field is greener than its cloth,

Adrienne Rich "Diving into the Wreck"

This is the place.And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hairstreams black, the merman in his armored body.We circle silentlyabout the wreckwe dive into the hold.I am she: I am he whose drowned face sleeps with open eyeswhose breasts still bear the stresswhose silver, copper, vermeil cargo liesobscurely inside barrelshalf-wedged and left to rotwe are the half-destroyed instrumentsthat once held to a coursethe water-eaten logthe fouled compass We are, I am, you areby cowardice or couragethe one who find our wayback to this scenecarrying a knife, a cameraa book of mythsin whichour names do not appear.

Adrienne Rich "Grandmothers"

We had no petnames, no diminutives for you, always the formal guest under my father's roof: you were "Grandmother Jones" and you visited rarely. I see you walking up and down the garden, restless, southern-accented, reserved, you did not seem my mother's mother or anyone's grandmother. You were Mary, widow of William, and no matriarch, yet smoldering to the end with frustrate life, ideas nobody listened to, least of all my father. One summer night you sat with my sister and me in the wooden glider long after twilight, holding us there with streams of pent-up words. You could quote every poet I had ever heard of, had read The Opium Eater, Amiel and Bernard Shaw, your green eyes looked clenched against opposition. You married straight out of the convent school, your background was country, you left an unperformed typescript of a play about Burr and Hamilton, you were impotent and brilliant, no one cared about your mind, you might have ended elsewhere than in that glider reciting your unwritten novels to the children.

Allen Ginsberg "Howl"

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities! Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind! Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! ********er in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch! Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky! Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

Allen Ginsberg "A Supermarket in California"

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon. In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations! What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

Philip Larkin "High Windows"

When I see a couple of kids And guess he's ****ing her and she's Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, I know this is paradise Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives- Bonds and gestures pushed to one side Like an outdated combine harvester, And everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, endlessly, I wonder if Anyone looked at me, forty years back, And thought, That'll be the life; No God any more, or sweating in the dark About hell and that, or having to hide What you think of the priest. He And his lot will all go down the long slide Like free bloody birds. And immediately Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Robert Lowell "Waking Early Sunday Morning"

When will we see Him face to face? Each day, He shines through darker glass. In this small town where everything is known, I see His vanishing emblems, His white spire and flag- pole sticking out above the fog, like old white china doorknobs, sad slight, useless things to calm the mad. Hamming military splendor, top-heavy Goliath in full armor- little redemption in the mass liquidations of their brass, elephant and phalanx moving with the times and still improving, when that kingdom hit the crash: a million foreskins stacked like trash... Sing softer! But what if a new diminuendo brings no true tenderness, only restlessness, excess, the hunger for success, sanity of self-deception fixed and kicked by reckless caution, while we listen to the bells- anywhere, but somewhere else! O to break loose. All life's grandeur is something with a girl in summer... elated as the President girdled by his establishment this Sunday morning, free to chaff his own thoughts with his bear-cuffed staf

Allen Ginsberg "A Supermarket in California"

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight? (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.) Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely. Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage? Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

Adrienne Rich "Grandmothers"

Your sweetness of soul was a mystery to me, you who slip-covered chairs, glued broken china, lived out of a wardrobe trunk in our guestroom summer and fall, then took the Pullman train in your darkblue dress and straw hat, to Alabama, shuttling half-yearly between your son and daughter. Your sweetness of soul was a convenience for everyone, how you rose with the birds and children, boiled your own egg, fished for hours on a pier, your umbrella spread, took the street-car downtown shopping endlessly for your son's whims, the whims of genius, kept your accounts in ledgers, wrote letters daily. All through World War Two the forbidden word Jewish was barely uttered in your son's house; your anger flared over inscrutable things. Once I saw you crouched on the guestroom bed, knuckles blue-white around the bedpost, sobbing your one brief memorable scene of rebellion: you didn't want to go back South that year. You were never "Grandmother Rich" but "Anana"; you had money of your own but you were homeless, Hattie, widow of Samuel, and no matriarch, dispersed among the children and grandchildren.

Robert Hayden "Witch Doctor"

and for a space allows to carry him. Dishevelled antiphons proclaim the moment his followers all day have hungered for, but which is his alone. He signals: tambourines begin, frenetic drumbeat and glissando. He dances from the altar, robes hissing, flaring, shimmering; down aisles where mantled guardsmen intercept wild hands that arduously strain to clutch his vestments, he dances, dances, ensorcelled and aloof, the fervid juba of God as lover, healer, conjurer. And of himself as God.

Elizabeth Bishop "Crusoe in England"

and play my home-made flute (I think it had the weirdest scale on earth) and, dizzy, whoop and dance among the goats. Home-made, home-made! But aren't we all? I felt a deep affection for the smallest of my island industries. No, not exactly, since the smallest was a miserable philosophy. Because I didn't know enough. Why didn't I know enough of something? Greek drama or astronomy? The books I'd read were full of blanks; the poems-well, I tried reciting to my iris-beds, "They flash upon that inward eye, which is the bliss..." The bliss of what? One of the first things that I did when I got back was look it up. The island smelled of goat and guano. The goats were white, so were the gulls, and both too tame, or else they thought I was a goat, too, or a gull. Baa, baa, baa and shriek, shriek, shriek, baa...shriek...baa...I still can't shake them from my ears; they're hurting now. The questioning shrieks, the equivocal replies over a ground of hissing rain and hissing, amb

Allen Ginsberg "Howl"

and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia, who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia, returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East, Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon, with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination— ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time— and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipsis catalogue a variable measure and the vibrating plane

Robert Hayden "Middle Passage"

but for the fevers melting down my bones. Shuttles in the rocking loom of history, the dark ships move, the dark ships move, their bright ironical names like jests of kindness on a murderer's mouth; plough through thrashing glister toward fata morgana's lucent melting shore, weave toward New World littorals that are mirage and myth and actual shore. Voyage through death, voyage whose chartings are unlove. A charnel stench, effluvium of living death spreads outward from the hold, where the living and the dead, the horribly dying, lie interlocked, lie foul with blood and excrement. Deep in the festering hold thy father lies, the corpse of mercy rots with him, rats eat love's rotten gelid eyes. But, oh, the living look at you with human eyes whose suffering accuses you, whose hatred reaches through the swill of dark, to strike you like a leper's claw. You cannot stare that hatred down or chain the fear that stalks the watches and breathes on you its fetid scorching breath; cannot

Amy Clampitt "Beethoven, Opus 111"

conversation book and pencil, candlestick, broken crockery, the Graf piano wrecked by repeated efforts to hear himself- out of a humdrum squalor the levitations, the shakes and triplets, the Adagio molto semplice e cantabile, the Arietta a disintegrating surf of blossom opening along the keyboard, along the fencerows the astonishment of sweetness. My father, driving somewhere in Kansas or Colorado, in dustbowl country, stopped the car to dig up by the roots a flower he'd never seen before-a kind of prickly poppy most likely, its luminousness wounding the blank plains like desire. He mentioned in a letter the disappointment of his having hoped it might transplant- an episode that brings me near tears, still, as even his dying does not- that awful dying, months-long, hunkered, irascible. From a clod no plowshare could deliver, a groan for someone (because he didn't want to look at anything) to take away the flowers, a bawling as of slaughterhouses, slogans of a general uprisi

Robert Hayden "Middle Passage"

knife's wounding flash, Cinquez, that surly brute who calls himself a prince, directing, urging on the ghastly work. He hacked the poor mulatto down, and then he turned on me. The decks were slippery when daylight finally came. It sickens me to think of what I saw, of how these apes threw overboard the butchered bodies of our men, true Christians all, like so much jetsam. Enough, enough. The rest is quickly told: Cinquez was forced to spare the two of us you see to steer the ship to Africa, and we like phantoms doomed to rove the sea voyaged east by day and west by night, deceiving them, hoping for rescue, prisoners on our own vessel, till at length we drifted to the shores of this your land, America, where we were freed from our unspeakable misery. Now we demand, good sirs, the extradition of Cinquez and his accomplices to La Havana. And it distresses us to know there are so many here who seem inclined to justify the mutiny of these blacks. We find it paradoxical indeed that you who

Amy Clampitt "A Procession at Candlemas"

nucleus of fire, the lost connection hallowing the wizened effigy, the mother curtained in Intensive Care: a Candlemas of moving lights along Route 80, at nightfall, in falling snow, the stillness and the sorrow of things moving back to where they came from.

Robert Lowell, "Memories of West Street and Lepke"

of the Jehovah's Witnesses. "Are you a C.O.?" I asked a fellow jailbird. "No," he answered, "I'm a J.W." He taught me the "hospital tuck," and pointed out the T-shirted back of Murder Incorporated's Czar Lepke, there piling towels on a rack, or dawdling off to his little segregated cell full of things forbidden the common man: a portable radio, a dresser, two toy American flags tied together with a ribbon of Easter palm. Flabby, bald, lobotomized, he drifted in a sheepish calm, where no agonizing reappraisal jarred his concentration on the electric chair- hanging like an oasis in his air of lost connections....

Amy Clampitt "Beethoven, Opus 111"

send their boys off to war. That fall, after the oily fireworks had cooled down to trellises of hairy wicks, he dug them up, rootstocks and all, and burned them. Do-gooder! The well-meant holocaust became a mist of venom, sowing itself along the sculptured hollows of his overalls, braceleting wrists and collarbone- a mesh of blisters spreading to a shirt worn like a curse. For weeks he writhed inside it. Awful. High art with a stiff neck: an upright Steinway bought in Chicago; a chromo of a Hobbema tree-avenue, or of Millet's imagined peasant, the lark she listens to invisible, perhaps congealed into an object nailed against the wall, its sole ironic function (if it has any) to demonstrate that one, though he may grunt and sweat at work, is not a clod. Beethoven might declare the air his domicile, the winds kin, the tornado a kind of second cousin; here, his labor merely shimmers-a deracinated album leaf, a bagatelle, the "Moonlight" rendered with a dying fall (the chords sub

Elizabeth Bishop "At the Fishhouses"

so I used to sing him Baptist hymns. I also sang "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God." He stood up in the water and regarded me steadily, moving his head a little. Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug as if it were against his better judgment. Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, the clear gray icy water...Back, behind us, the dignified tall firs begin. Bluish, associating with their shadows, a million Christmas trees stand waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones. I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same, slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones, icily free above the stones, above the stones and then the world. If you should dip your hand in, your wrist would ache immediately, your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn as if the water were a transmutation of fire that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame. If you tasted it, it would firs

Elizabeth Bishop "In the Waiting Room"

the National Geographic (I could read) and carefully studied the photographs: the inside of a volcano, black, and full of ashes; then it was spilling over in rivulets of fire. Osa and Martin Johnson dressed in riding breeches, laced boots, and pith helmets. A dead man slung on a pole - "Long Pig," the caption said. Babies with pointed heads wound round and round with string; black, naked women with necks wound round and round with wire like the necks of light bulbs. Their breasts were horrifying. I read it right straight through. I was too shy to stop. And then I looked at the cover: the yellow margins, the date. Suddenly, from inside, came an oh! of pain -Aunt Consuelo's voice- not very loud or long. I wasn't at all surprised; even then I knew she was a foolish, timid woman. I might have been embarrassed, but wasn't. What took me completely by surprise was that it was me: my voice, in my mouth. Without thinking at all I was my foolish aunt, I-we-were falling, falli

Elizabeth Bishop "Crusoe in England"

the bluish blade, the broken tip, the lines of wood-grain on the handle... Now it won't look at me at all. The living soul has dribbled away. My eyes rest on it and pass on. The local museum's asked me to leave everything to them: the flute, the knife, the shrivelled shoes, my shedding goatskin trousers (moths have got in the fur), the parasol that took me such a time remembering the way the ribs should go. It still will work but, folded up, looks like a plucked and skinny fowl. How can anyone want such things? -And Friday, my dear Friday, died of measles seventeen years ago come March.

Amy Clampitt "A Procession at Candlemas"

the rest-in-peace of the placental coracle. Of what the dead were, living, one knows so little as barely to recognize the fabric of the backward-ramifying antecedents, half-noted presences in darkened rooms: the old, the feared, the hallowed. Never the same river drowns the unalterable doorsill. An effigy in olive wood or pear wood, dank with the sweat of age, walled in the dark at Brauron, Argos, Samos: even the unwed Athene, who had no mother, born-it's declared- of some man's brain like every other pure idea, had her own wizened cult object, kept out of sight like the incontinent whimperer in the backstairs bedroom, where no child ever goes-to whom, year after year, the fair linen of the sacred peplos was brought in ceremonial procession- flutes and stringed instruments, wildflower- hung cattle, nubile Athenian girls, young men praised for the beauty of their bodies. Who can unpeel the layers of that seasonal returning to the dark where memory fails, as birds re-enter th

Amy Clampitt "A Procession at Candlemas"

unloved, the spawn of botched intentions, grief a mere hardening of the gut, a set piece of what can't be avoided: parents by the tens of thousands living unthanked, unpaid but in the sour coin of resentment. Midmorning gray as zine along Route 80, corn-stubble quilting the underside of snowdrifts, the cadaverous belvedere of windmills, the sullen stare of feedlot cattle; black creeks puncturing white terrain, the frozen bottomland a mush of willow tops; dragnetted in ice, the Mississippi. Westward toward the dark, the undertow of scenes come back to, fright riddling the structures of interior history: Where is it? Where, in the shucked-off bundle, the hampered obscurity that has been for centuries the mumbling lot of women, did the thread of fire, too frail ever to discover what it meant, to risk even the taking of a shape, relinquish the seed of possibility, unguessed-at as a dream of something precious? Memory, that exquisite blunderer, stumbling like a migrant bird that finds the

Allen Ginsberg "Howl"

who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion, who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery, who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music, who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts, who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology, who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish, who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom, who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg, who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade, who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried, who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality, who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer

Allen Ginsberg "Howl"

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head, the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death, and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

Allen Ginsberg "Howl"

who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword, who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom, who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate **** and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness, who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake, who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too, who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices, who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-heat and opium

Allen Ginsberg "Howl"

who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain, who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa, who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago, who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets, who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed, who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons, who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication, who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts, who let themselves be ****ed ********** by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy, who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love, who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may

Amy Clampitt "A Procession at Candlemas"

within layer, at the core a dream of something precious, ripped: Where are we? The sleepers groan, stir, rewrap themselves about the self's imponderable substance, or clamber down, numb-footed, half in a drowse of freezing dark, through a Stonehenge of fuel pumps, the bison hulks slantwise beside them, drinking. What is real except what's fabricated? The jellies glitter cream-capped in the cafeteria showcase; gumball globes, Life Savers cinctured in parcel gilt, plop from their housings perfect, like miracles. Comb, nail clipper, lip rouge, mirrors and emollients embody, niched into the washroom wall case, the pristine seductiveness of money. Absently, without inhabitants, this nowhere oasis wears the place name of Indian Meadows. The westward-trekking transhumance, once only, of a people who, in losing everything they had, lost even the names they went by, stumbling past like caribou, perhaps camped here. Who can assign a trade-in value to that sorrow? The monk in sheepskin over t