the quality of being complete; unbroken condition; entirety ~ Webster A wild patience has taken me this far as if I had to bring to shore a

1 You, once a belle in Shreveport, with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud, still have your dresses copied from that time, and play a

My swirling wants. Your frozen lips. The grammar turned and attacked me. Themes, written under duress. Emptiness of the notations. They gave me

Living in the earth-deposits of our history Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth one bottle amber perfect a

A woman of the citizen party—what’s that— is writing history backward her body the chair she sits in to be abandoned repossessed The old,

My three sisters are sitting on rocks of black obsidian. For the first time, in this light, I can see who they are. My first sister is sewing

Aunt Jennifer\'s tigers prance across a screen, Bright topaz denizens of a world of green. They do not fear the men beneath the tree; They pace in

Far back when I went zig-zagging through tamarack pastures you were my genius, you my cast-iron Viking, my helmed lion-heart king in

1. A conversation begins with a lie. and each speaker of the so-called common language feels the ice-floe split, the drift apart as if

Thinking of Caroline Herschel, 1750-1848, Astronomer, Sister of William; and Others A woman in the shape of a monster a monster in the shape of a

Something spreading underground won\'t speak to us under skin won\'t declare itself not all life-forms want dialogue with the machine-gods in

First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on the body-armor of black rubber the

My mouth hovers across your breasts in the short grey winter afternoon in this bed we are delicate and touch so hot with joy we amaze

Our whole life a translation the permissible fibs and now a knot of lies eating at itself to get undone Words bitten thru

Their life, collapsed like unplayed cards, is carried piecemeal through the snow; Headboard and footboard now, the bed where she has lain desiring

The world\'s not wanton only wild and wavering I wanted to choose words that even you would have to be changed by Take the word of my

She had thought the studio would keep itself; no dust upon the furniture of love. Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal, the panes relieved of

Stripped you\'re beginning to float free up through the smoke of brushfires and incinerators the unleafed branches won\'t hold you nor the radar

1. Sex, as they harshly call it, I fell into this morning at ten o\'clock, a drizzling hour of traffic and wet newspapers. I thought of him

Miracle\'s truck comes down the little avenue, Scott Joplin ragtime strewn behind it like pearls, and, yes, you can feel happy with one piece of

It will not be simple, it will not take long It will take little time, it will take all your thought It will take all your heart, it will take all

A life hauls itself uphill through hoar-mist steaming the sun\'s tongue licking leaf upon leaf into stricken liquid When? When? cry the

I dreamed I called you on the telephone to say: Be kinder to yourself but you were sick and would not answer The waste of my love goes on this

In those years, people will say, we lost track of the meaning of we, of you we found ourselves reduced to I and the whole thing became silly,

I know you are reading this poem late, before leaving your office of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window in the lassitude of

Either you will go through this door or you will not go through. If you go through there is always risk of remembering your name. Things

The clouds and the stars didn\'t wage this war the brooks gave no information if the mountains spewed stones of fire into the river it was not

The pact that we made was the ordinary pact of men & women in those days I don’t know who we thought we were that our personalities could

We can look into the stove tonight as into a mirror, yes, the serrated log, the yellow-blue gaseous core the crimson-flittered grey ash,

Good-by to you whom I shall see tomorrow, Next year and when I\'m fifty; still good-by. This is the leave we never really take. If you were dead

This is the grass your feet are planted on. You paint it orange or you sing it green, But you have never found A way to make the grass mean what

Talking of poetry, hauling the books arm-full to the table where the heads bend or gaze upward, listening, reading aloud, talking of consonants,