Collected poems : 1950-2012

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 kissed you, bride and lost, and went -- 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. You, once a belle in Shreveport, -- Banging the coffee-pot into the sink -- A thinking woman sleeps with monsters. -- Knowing themselves too well in one another: -- Dulce ridens, dulce loquens -- When to her lute Corinna sings -- "To have in this uncertain world some stay -- "You all die at fifteen, " said Diderot, -- Not that it is done well, but -- Well, -- Passing on -- The raven -- Merely to know. Wedged in by earthworks -- Let me take you by the hair -- Spirit like water -- Antinoüs: the diaries -- Juvenilia -- Double monologue -- A woman mourned by daughters -- Readings of history. The evil eye -- The confrontation -- Memorabilia -- Consanguinity -- The mirror -- 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). Poems 1962-1965. Necessities of life -- In the woods -- The corpse-plant -- The trees -- Like this together. Wind rocks the car. -- They're tearing down, tearing up -- We have, as they say, -- Our words misunderstand us. -- Dead winter doesn't die, -- Breakfast in a bowling alley in Utica, New York -- Open-air museum -- Two songs. Sex, as they harshly call it, -- That "old last act"! -- The parting -- Night-pieces: for a child. The crib -- Her waking -- The stranger -- After dark. You are falling asleep and I sit looking at you -- Now let's away from prison-- -- Mourning picture -- "I am in danger--sir--" -- Halfway -- Autumn sequence. An old shoe, an old pot, an old skin, -- Still, as sweetness hardly earned -- Your flag is dried-blood, turkey-comb -- Skin of wet leaves on asphalt. -- Noon -- Not like that -- The knot -- Any husband to any wife -- Side by side -- Spring thunder. Thunder is all it is, and yet -- Whatever you are that weeps -- The power of the dinosaur -- A soldier is here, an ancient figure, -- Over him, over you, a great roof is rising, -- Moth hour -- Focus -- Face to face -- 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). 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. The winter dream -- Summer in the country -- The demonstration -- Night in the kitchen -- 5:30 A.M. -- The break -- Two poems (adapted from Anna Akhmatova). There's a secret boundary hidden in the waving grasses: -- On the terrace, violins played -- The key -- Picnic -- The book -- Abnegation -- Leaflets. Women -- Implosions -- To Frantz Fanon -- Continuum -- On edges -- Violence -- The observer -- Nightbreak -- Gabriel -- Leaflets. The big star, and that other -- Your face -- If, says the Dahomeyan devil, -- Crusaders' wind glinting -- The strain of being born -- The rafts -- 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. My neighbor, a scientist and art-collector, ... -- To imagine a time of silence -- "People suffer highly in poverty... -- We lie under the sheet -- 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. Suppose you stood facing -- On a screen as wide as this, I grope for the titles. -- Suppose we had time -- The island blistered our feet. -- When I close my eyes -- To record -- Letters: March 1969. Foreknown. The victor -- Hopes sparkle like water in the clean carafe. -- "I am up at sunrise -- Six months back -- Pieces. Breakpoint -- Relevance -- Memory -- Time and place -- Revelation -- Our whole life -- Your letter -- Stand up -- The stelae -- Snow -- The will to change. That Chinese restaurant was a joke -- Knocked down in the canefield -- Beardless again, phoning -- At the wings of the mirror, peacock plumes -- The cabdriver from the Bronx -- The photograph of the unmade bed -- Images for Godard. Language as city:: Wittgenstein -- To know the extremes of light -- To love, to move perpetually -- At the end of Alphaville -- Interior monologue of the poet: -- A valediction forbidding mourning -- Shooting script. 11/69-2/70. We were bound on the wheel of an endless conversation. -- Ghazal V (adapted from Mirza Ghalib) -- The old blanket. The crumbs of rubbed wool turning up. -- In my imagination I was the pivot of a fresh beginning. -- Of simple choice they are the villagers; ... -- You are beside me like a wall; ... -- Picking the wax to crumbs... -- 3-7/70. A woman waking behind grimed blinds... -- (Newsreel) -- They come to you with their descriptions of your soul. -- The mare's skeleton in the clearing: another sign of life. -- I was looking for a way out of a lifetime's consolations. -- We are driven to odd attempts; ... -- Whatever it was: the grains of the glacier... --

Diving into the wreck (1971-1972). 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 -- The phenomenology of anger -- 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 -- 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). Power. Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev -- Origins and history of consciousness -- Splittings -- Hunger -- To a poet -- Cartographies of silence -- The lioness -- Twenty-one love poems. Wherever in this city, screens flicker -- I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming. -- Since we're not young, weeks have to do time -- I come home from you through the early light of spring -- This apartment full of books could crack open -- Your small hands, precisely equal to my own-- -- What kind of beast would turn its life into words? -- I can see myself years back at Sunion, -- our silence today is a pond where drowned things live -- Your dog, tranquil and innocent, dozes through -- Every peak is a crater. This is the law of volcanoes, -- Sleeping, turning in turn like planets -- The rules break like a thermometer, -- It was your vision of the pilot -- (The floating poem, unnumbered) -- If I lay on that beach with you -- Across a city from you, I'm with you, -- No one's fated or doomed to love anyone. -- Rain on the West Side Highway, -- Can it be growing colder when I begin -- That conversation we were always on the edge -- The dark lintels, the blue and foreign stones -- 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. Mary Gravely Jones -- Hattie Rice Rich -- Granddaughter -- The spirit of place. Over the hills in Shutesbury, Leverett -- The mountain laurel in bloom -- Strangers are an endangered species -- The river-fog will do for privacy -- Orion plunges like a drunken hunter -- Frame -- Rift -- A vision -- Turning the wheel. Location -- Burden baskets -- Hohokam -- Self-hatred -- Particularity -- Apparition -- Mary Jane Colter, 1904 -- Turning the wheel --

Your native land, your life (1981-1985). Sources -- 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 -- Contradictions: tracking poems. Look: this is January the worst onslaught -- Heart of cold. Bones of cold. Scalp of cold -- My mouth hovers across your breasts -- He slammed his hand across my face and I -- She is carrying my madness and I dread her -- Dear Adrienne: I'm calling you up tonight -- Dear Adrienne, I feel signified by pain -- I'm afraid of prison. Have been all these years. Tearing but not yet town: this page -- Night over the great and the little worlds -- I came out of the hospital like a woman -- Violence as purification: the one idea. -- Trapped in one idea, you can't have your feelings, -- Lately in my dreams I hear long sentences -- You who think I find words for everything, -- It's true, these last few years I've lived -- I have backroads I take to places -- The problem, unstated till now, is how -- If to feel is to be unreliable -- The tobacco fields lie fallow the migrant pickers -- The cat-tails blaze in the corner sunflowers -- In a bald skull sits our friend in a helmet -- You know the government must have pushed them to settle, -- Someone said to me: it's just that we don't -- Did anyone ever know who we were -- You: air-driven reft from the tuber-bitten soil -- The Tolstoyans the Afro-American slaves -- This high summer we love will pour its light -- 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). A dark woman, head bent, listening for something -- Here is a map of our country: -- Two five-pointed star-shaped glass candleholders, ... -- Late summers, early autumns, you can see something that binds -- Catch if you can your country's moment, begin -- A potato explodes in the oven. Poetry and famine: -- (The dream-site) some rooftop, water-tank looming, street-racket strangely quelled -- He thought there would be a limit and that it would stop him. He depended on that: -- One this earth, in this life, as I read your story, you're lonely. -- Soledad. =f. solitude, loneliness, homesickness; lonely retreat. -- One night on Monterey Bay the death-freeze of the century: -- What homage will be paid to a beauty built to last -- (Dedications) I know you are reading this poem -- She -- That mouth -- Olivia -- Eastern war time. Memory lifts her smoky mirror: 1943, -- Girl between home and school, what is that girl -- How telegrams used to come: ring -- What the grown-ups can't speak of would you push -- A young girl knows she is young and meant to live -- A girl wanders with a boy into the woods -- A woman of sixty driving -- A woman wired in memories -- Streets closed, emptied by force guns at corners -- Memory says: want to do right? Don't count on me -- Tattered Kaddish -- Through corralitos under rolls of cloud. Showering after 'flu; stripping the bed; -- If you know who died in that bed, do you know -- That light of outrage is the light of history -- She who died on that bed sees it her way: -- For a friend in travail -- 1948: Jews -- Two arts. I've redone you by daylight. -- Raise it up there and it will -- Darklight. Early day. Grey the air. -- 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. Not what you thought: just a turn-off -- Calle visión-- Lodged in the difficult hotel -- Calle vision your heart beats on unbroken -- Ammonia -- The repetitive motions of slaughtering -- You can call on beauty still and it will leap -- In the room in the house -- In the black net -- 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. You drew up the story of your life -- You drew up a story about me -- You were telling a story about women to young men -- You were telling a story about love -- I was telling you a story about love -- 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). 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 -- USonian journals 2000 -- Territory shared. Address -- Transparencies -- Livresque -- Collaborations -- Ritual acts -- Point in time -- 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 -- Memorize this -- The painter's house -- After Apollinaire & Brassens -- Slashes -- Trace elements -- Bract -- Dislocations: seven scenarios. Still learning the word -- In a vast dystopic space the small things -- City and world: this infection drinks like a drinker -- For recalcitrancy of attitude -- Faces in the mesh: defiance or disdain -- Not to get up and go back to the drafting table -- Tonight someone will sleep in a stripped apartment -- Five o'clock, January 2003 -- Wait -- Don't take me -- To have written the truth -- Screen door -- Tendril --

Telephone ringing in the labyrinth (2004-2006). Voyage to the denouement -- Skeleton key -- Wallpaper -- In plain sight -- Behind the motel -- Melancholy piano (extracts) -- Archaic -- Long after Stevens -- Improvisation on lines from Edwin Muir's "variations on a time theme" -- Rhyme -- Hotel -- Three elegies. Late style -- As ever -- Fallen figure -- Hubble photographs: after Sappho -- This is not the room -- Unknown quantity -- Tactile value -- Midnight, the same day. When the sun seals my eyes the emblem -- Try to rest now, says a voice -- Even then maybe -- Director's notes -- Rereading The dead lecturer -- Letters censored, shredded, returned to sender, or judged unfit to send -- If/as though -- Time exposures. Glance into glittering moisture -- Is there a doctor in the house -- They'd say she was humorless -- When I stretched out my legs beyond your wishful thinking -- You've got ocean through sheet glass brandy and firelog -- The university reopens as the floods recede -- Via insomnia -- A burning kangaroo -- Ever, again -- Draft #2006 -- Telephone ringing in the labyrinth --

Tonight no poetry will serve (2007-2010). 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 -- Scenes of negotiation -- From sickbed shores -- Axel Avákar. Axel: a backstory -- Axel, in thunder -- I was there, Axel -- Axel, darkly seen, in a glass house -- Ballade of the poverties -- Emergency clinic -- Confrontations -- Circum/stances -- Winterface -- Quarto -- Don't flinch -- Black locket -- Generosity -- 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.