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Editor’s Note

Selected Poems

Levitation

Some Joke, Huh?

My brother is weird. I never know what he’s going to do next. Like the time he decides around three o’clock on an August afternoon that he’s going to climb the Franklin Mountains.

My Body

Chest pains, milk-and-honey days, my best friend

Precedent

In 1975 I came to love Faye Henry. She was thirty-five years older than I and necessary for my mother, who had no friends at Harvard until she and Faye Henry fell asleep together in the back of “Practicum in Ethnographic Futures Research,” knew they were destined to be friends, and have been ever since.

The Witch, The Swan, And The Middle Class

I’m not praising the middle class, but we are returning to the problem of why so many of our poems carry no values except private ones. I think the universities have had a part in this. One could say that the M.F.A. programs de-class a young poet.

Black Reaper

We couldn’t have been more delighted, Buck and I, he in the warm arms of Mr. Boston, me in the warm arms of life in the sunny south, at a time when the shadows were hazy, the sunshine was bright, and the smell of the newly cropped bermuda grass touched my nostrils, and the days awaited me breathlessly, endlessly.

City/Country Miners

Some Northern California Veins

This time he’s more me than I am and we have been here together many lifetimes before and we are drinking each other alive. This is the moment to die. Nothing can get better. Nothing does.

The Funeral

He remembered feeling sick with fear. She had been breathing with difficulty, the air making a rasping sound in her throat. She sounded different — almost impolite. Sounds that used to mean Nana were the floating notes of her harpsichord, the soft rustle of the pages she turned in story books, songs half hummed half whispered, and the small clicking of her knitting needles.