Collected Early Poems

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