The poets are dead, the city dying.
Anne, Sylvia, Keats
with his passionate lungs,

For I will consider my dog Poochkin
(& his long-lost brothers, Chekarf & Dogstoyevsky).

I, Erica Jong, in the midst of my life,
        having had two parents, two sisters,
        two husbands, two books of poems

My friends are tired.
The ones who are married are tired
of being married.

My father was a forester in the Alpine woods
and also in the Andes. He roamed about the

Then,
like you said,
we’d been sprung by two pals.

Yes, streetcars once ran in this town, and
they ran from the train depot to the cemetery

My father was a painter and a whitewasher.

The crane creaks. The crane is 100 feet high
and painted yellow.

When, in the evening, I explore the succulent shadows
with their blue veins and black chrysanthemums,
their thorny places,