I dream you, and you come to me
intact, in focus, indiscreet, mouthing
the sweetest lies as if we cared.

How many statesmen let you move their lips
  like creaking shutters while they stood there dazed?
What statues did you dedicate? What ships

Out walking ties left over from a track
Where nothing travels now but rust and grass,
I half-believe in something that would pass

The Lion sleeps with open eyes
That none may take him by surprise.
The Son of God he signifies

In a prominent bar in Secaucus one day 
Rose a lady in skunk with a top heavy sway,
Raised a knobby red finger—all turned from their beer—

Though it is not our right to claim that the poets represented in the following portfolio would have remained in dark unfathomed caves of ocean had it not been for The Paris Review, surely all are among those writers whom this magazine has helped make known. 

Three hot-eyed kids hard on a fix’s heels.
Enraged that the cash he had on him was small,
Did in James Edmondson, famed vaudeville’s

 The apparition of these faces in the bough;
Crowds on a wet, black petal.

The apparition of these boughs in the face;
Crowds on a wet, black petal.

The Venetian Republic regarded the art of mirror-making as a state secret, to be conserved by any sanction necessary, including the most extreme.

                                  •

I got this from a man on the street
in Richmond, circa 1964, who
offered me an easy job in his hotel