Last Bender

I wrote this poem in 1990 or so. It just all came out at once and has changed very little since then. I had read the introduction to Fernand Braudel’s The Identity of France. In that introduction he cites a French proverb that the soil is planted with peasants. And then he estimates how many […]

A Midnight Thirst
 
A midnight thirst comes upon me.
The gold held steady between us burns.
Water bends to the moon. 
Nocturnal, shifting in the shadows
Hiding from the high hoots of owls,
Patient steps of panther feet.
Faces pressed against the moss
Our hearts like bats in circles.

Ten, less, five minutes to go
And dim are the days
Long and grey
And the hours are grim
 
Rain pours through the iron grate
Dirt slurries on the asphalt
Dim are the days and grey
Sky comes down like a scrim
 
Grim is the acid taste of rain
Running through the hair
Down the cheek
And into the mouth like a drain
 
Perfumed ladies, old […]

I wrote this when I was living in the city in 1990. I had never lived alone in my adult life. My children were with their mother, Shelly, in Ithaca. I saw them every two weeks. We went to all the old places, Rosemary’s Pizza and DeRoberti’s, Thompkins Square Park, the playground in Washington Square, […]

What I think of Niedecker changes with my mood. This is from the 2002 Collected Works. Before that, as with Oppen, there were incomplete or eccentric selected editions of her work. One, From This Condensery is, according to Jenny Penberty, the editor of the collected edition, “seriously flawed”. It is also a gorgeous book and […]

This is an excerpt from the beginning of Endangered Species. It begins with the sentence Eric maroney thought should be the first sentence of the book. I tried to make it that, I really did, but I couldn’t make the book work that way. It couldn’t start with Roy or Sally. It had to start […]

Somehow I revised and posted My Salty Cat without noticing the reference to Times Square as it was, long ago, and not at all as it is. The imagery of skin boils and amputees mixed in with tourists is just incomprehensible now. I could replace it, but with what? Surely there are bums still, and […]

This is from Doctor Drink, by JV Cunningham.
4. Epitaph for Someone or Other
Naked I came, naked I leave the scene,
And naked was my pastime in between.

PA UBU.–Hornstrumpet! We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings.