Poetry
If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath, I’d live with scarlet Majors at the Base, And speed glum heroes up the line to death. You’d see me with my puffy petulant face, …
If ever two were one, then surely we. If ever man were loved by wife, then thee; If ever wife were happy in a man, Compare with me, ye women, if you can. I prize …
Addressed to Liu Mēng-tē Between thirty and forty, one is distracted by the Five Lusts; Between seventy and eighty, one is a prey to a hundred diseases. But from fifty to sixty one is free …
What the heart of the young man said to the psalmist Tell me not, in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream! — For the soul is dead that slumbers, And things are not …
Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding, No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them, No more modest than immodest. Unscrew the locks …
After the war, after I was born, my father’s hobby (perhaps his obsession) was photography. New fathers often become photographers, it seems. But he took pictures of many things besides me, as if he suddenly …
I love being a woman to be forty years old to be mistress of my life to fall in love with men to easily forget men to write my poems to cook aromatic dishes to …
— for Austin at the restaurant we sit down to wine we are so hungry the crisp appetizers/early loves and lightly seasoned salad we’ve developed appetites for the garlic & onion of life gorging on …
I had a little Sorrow, Born of a little Sin, I found a room all damp with gloom And shut us all within; And, “Little Sorrow, weep,” said I, “And, Little Sin, pray God to …
Milkweed grows by my fence. Don’t ask me to pull it. Weeds were my friends in childhood — emerald explosions in the dull cinders of train track, green lace at the sleeves of our water …
Have a nice day. Have a memorable day. Have (however unlikely) a life-changing day. Have a day of soaking rain and lightning. Have a confused day thinking about fate. Have a day of wholes. Have …