#AmericanWriters
He was six foot four, and forty… and even colder than he thought he… James Thurber, The Thirteen Cloc… Not that I cared about the other… Those perfumed breasts with hearts
And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy. —William Blake Because I would not admit that I had nurtured
I began by loving women & the love turned to bitterness. My mother, the bitter, whose bitter lesson–
Love, death, sleeping with somebody else’s husband or wife-this is what poetry is about-Eskimo, Aztec,
I put our books face to face so they could talk. They whispered about us. I put yours on top of mine. They would not mate.
After the college reading, the eager students gather. They ask me
Chi vuol esser lieto, sia: di doman non c’e certezza. —Lorenzo di Medici In the poplars’ lengthening shadow… amid the rows of marigolds and ear…
People wish to be settled. Onl… —Thoreau My life has been the instrument for a mouth
When I am an old lady the young men will come to me & sit trembling at my trembling
My broom with its tufts of roses beckoning at the black, with its crown of thistles, prickling the sky,
In the chest is caged bat who seeks escape through the mouth. He flaps his wings & the molars shiver.
If it is impossible to promise absolute fidelity, this is because we learn so much geography from the shifting of one body
I was sick of being a woman, sick of the pain, the irrelevant detail of sex, my own concavity uselessly hungering
The great bed of the world arching over graves over Babi Yar with its multitude of bones, with battalions of screams
I sit at my desk alone as I did on many Sunday afternoons when you came back to me, your arms aching for me,