“When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas … ”

The thump of the newspaper on the porch
on Christmas Day, in the dark before dawn
yet after Santa Claus has left his gifts:

Although stone nudes are everywhere—some crammed
two to a column, supple caryatids,
and others mooning in the Tuileries—

Be ever after merry,
My dear Miss Terriberry:
Enjoy a very very

Off, on—there must be something else,
some middle way, third eye, or shakti current.

His head and legs were like a watch work’s ticking,
but spaced by intervals of what seemed thought.

 

That women in their marble glory still
had pubic hair so startled Ruskin he
turned impotent, and had to be divorced.

Motion, motion.
Within the body cells
each nucleus rotates widdershins

My grandmother used it, Dutch Cleanser, 
in the dark Shillington halls, 
in the kitchen darkened by the grape arbor, 

Imogene pressed her face against the window, making a lozenge of cold wetness on her left cheek. It was raining. Great gray streamers hung from the sky, in mourning for an angel. Today was the day