I sit at home at my desk alone as I used to do on many sunday afternoons when you came back to me,

On a darkening planet speeding toward our death, we pierce a rosy cloud & hit clean air,

The poet fears failure & so she says “Hold on pen— what if the critics hate me?”

The great bed of the world arching over graves over Babi Yar with its multitude of bones, with battalions of screams

Because you did, I too arrange fl… Watching the pistils just like ins… And the hard, red flesh of the pet… Widening beneath my eyes. They mo… Of clocks, seeming not to move exc…

I mourn a dead friend, like myself… —Pablo Neruda about César Vallej… I looked at the book. ‘It will stand,’ I thought. Not a palace

Smoke, it is all smoke in the throat of eternity. . . . For centuries, the air was full of… Whistling up chimneys on their spiky brooms

He says he is a perfect poet. He lives alone, with his perfect m… & sometimes they don’t even sp… So perfectly do they ‘communicate.… He lives alone, his greatest pleas…

Sweet muse with bitter milk, I have lain between your breasts, put my ear

The man giving birth in the dark has died & come back to life again, is stretching out his arms

‘Death is our eternal companion,’… —Carlos Castaneda My death looks exactly like me. She lives to my left,

I am happiest near the ocean, where the changing light reminds me of my death & the fact that it need not be…

the sky sinks its blue teeth into the mountains. Rising on pure will (the lurch & lift-off, the sudden swing

After the teach-in we smeared the walls with our solidarity, looked left, & saw Marx among the angels,

My broom with its tufts of roses beckoning at the black, with its crown of thistles, prickling the sky,