Human Form (audio only)
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August, 1953
A nurse gathers up the afterbirth. My mother * had been howling but now could sleep. * By this time I am gone—also gathered up * & wheeled out. Above my jaundiced face the nurses hover. * Outside, a scab commands a city bus. The picketers battle cops * & ten thousand Soviet conscripts in goggles * kneel & cover their eyes.
2011
Inauguration Day, 2025
… dreadful was the din
Of hissing through the hall, thick swarming now
With complicated monsters … —“Paradise Lost,” Book X
2025
For the Scribe Gar.Una of Uruk, 3,000 B. C.
—author of the earliest known signature
That arrow & life were homonyms. That his name
Predates all others, incised sunbaked on a slab
Of Eupratian clay. Stylus a broken reed, though it
Carries somehow the bedazzled opalescent mojo
Of transfiguration. The hand which holds it edges right
& reaching the margin circles back, right to left
2014