"Daddy" Warbucks
In Memoriam What’s missing is the eyeballs In each of us, but it doesn’t matter Because you’ve got the bucks, the bucks, the bucks. You let me touch them, fondle the green faces Lick
The Evil Seekers
We are born with luck Which is to say with gold in our mouth. As new and smooth as a grape, As pure as a pond in Alaska, As good as the stem of
The Fury Of Flowers And Worms
Let the flowers make a journey On Monday so that I can see Ten daisies in a blue vase With perhaps one red ant Crawling to the gold center. A bit of the field
The Fury Of Beautiful Bones
Sing me a thrush, bone. Sing me a nest of cup and pestle. Sing me a sweetbread fr an old grandfather. Sing me a foot and a doorknob, for you are my love. Oh
Raccoon
Coon, why did you come to this dance With a mask on? Why not the tin man And his rainbow girl? Why not Racine, His hair marcelled down to his chest? Why not come
My Friend, My Friend
Who will forgive me for the things I do? With no special legend of God to refer to, With my calm white pedigree, my yankee kin, I think it would be better to be
Lessons In Hunger
“Do you like me?” I asked the blue blazer. No answer. Silence bounced out of his books. Silence fell off his tongue And sat between us And clogged my throat. It slaughtered my trust.
End, Middle, Beginning
There was an unwanted child. Aborted by three modern methods She hung on to the womb, Hooked onto I Building her house into it And it was to no avail, To black her out.
To A Friend Whose Work Has Come To Triumph
Consider Icarus, pasting those sticky wintgs on, Testing that strange little tug at his shoulder blade, And think of that first flawless moment over the lawn Of the labyrinth. Think of the difference it
Lullaby
It is a summer evening. The yellow moths sag Against the locked screens And the faded curtains Suck over the window sills And from another building A goat calls in his dreams. This is
In The Deep Museum
My God, my God, what queer corner am I in? Didn’t I die, blood running down the post, Lungs gagging for air, die there for the sin Of anyone, my sour mouth giving up
Sylvia's Death
for Sylvia Plath O Sylvia, Sylvia, With a dead box of stones and spoons, With two children, two meteors Wandering loose in a tiny playroom, With your mouth into the sheet, Into the roofbeam,
The Fury Of Sunsets
Something Cold is in the air, An aura of ice And phlegm. All day I’ve built A lifetime and now The sun sinks to Undo it. The horizon bleeds And sucks its thumb. The
The Truth the Dead Know
For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959 And my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959 Gone, I say and walk from church, Refusing the stiff procession to the grave, Letting the
Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)
Consider A girl who keeps slipping off, Arms limp as old carrots, Into the hypnotist’s trance, Into a spirit world Speaking with the gift of tongues. She is stuck in the time machine, Suddenly