First, are you our sort of a person? Do you wear A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch, A brace or a hook, Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,…

Two, of course there are two. It seems perfectly natural now — The one who never looks up, whose eyes are lidded And balled, like Blake’s, Who exhibits The birthmarks…

You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe…

I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it — A sort of walking miracle, my skin Bright as a Nazi lampshade, My right foot A…

The woman is perfected. Her dead Body wears the smile of accomplishment, The illusion of a Greek necessity Flows in the scrolls of her toga, Her bare Feet seem to…

I shall never get out of this! There are two of me now: This new absolutely white person and the old yellow one, And the white person is certainly the…

IN THIS AGE OF HARD TRYING NONCHALANCE IS GOOD, AND really, it is not the business of the gods to bake clay pots. They did not do it in this…

Whatever it is, it’s a passion – a benign dementia that should be engulfing America, fed in a way the opposite of the way in which the Minotaur was fed….

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it after all, a…

Art is exact perception: If the outcome is deception Then I think the fault must lie Partly with the critic’s eye, And no man who’s done his part Need apologize…

is an enchanted thing     like the glaze on a katydid-wing         subdivided by sun         till the nettings are legion. Like Gieseking playing Scarlatti; like the apteryx-awl     as a beak, or the…

My father used to say, “Superior people never make long visits, have to be shown Longfellow’s grave nor the glass flowers at Harvard. Self reliant like the cat — that…