On Forty-first Street
near Eighth Avenue
a frame house wobbles.
...
Open the door now.
Go roll up the collar of your coat
To walk in the changing scarf of mist.
...
Paula is digging and shaping the loam of a salvia,
Scarlet Chinese talker of summer.
Two petals of crabapple blossom blow fallen in Paula's
hair,
...
To Certain Poets About to Die
Take your fill of intimate remorse, perfumed sorrow,
Over the dead child of a millionaire,
...
RINGS of iron gray smoke; a woman’s steel face … looking … looking.
Funnels of an ocean liner negotiating a fog night; pouring a
...
[They picked him up in the grass where he had lain two
days in the rain with a piece of shrapnel in his lungs.]
Come to me only with playthings now. . .
...
Shaken,
The blossoms of lilac,
And shattered,
The atoms of purple.
...
Red drips from my chin where I have been eating.
Not all the blood, nowhere near all, is wiped off my mouth.
Clots of red mess my hair
And the tiger, the buffalo, know how.
...
Ten minutes now I have been looking at this.
I have gone by here before and wondered about it.
This is a bronze memorial of a famous general
Riding horseback with a flag and a sword and a revolver
...
You have spoken the answer.
A child searches far sometimes
Into the red dust
On a dark rose leaf
...