Acknowledgments
Contents
Rhymed Foreword by Joseph Brodsky
Preface
Part I. Mostly Hospital and Old Age: (New Long Poems, Mostly 1990–1995)
1. At My Hospital Window
2. Dionysus in Old Age
3. Goat Ode in Mid-Dive
4. Pluto Incognito
5. Continuities
6. Counter-Continuities
7. Rogue
8. Full of Life
9. Welcome to Tarsus
10. Up
11. Down
12. Old Fool, Die Quicker
13. Re-feel
Part II. Ore: (Shorter Poems, Both New and Old)
1. Song to the End
2. Which of Us Two?
3. Ore
4. Hut Wait
5. Autumn: A Dialogue on Three Levels
6. To Helen (of Troy, N.Y.)
7. Birth of Song
8. Eyelids
9. By the Way
10. Small Perfect Manhattan
11. In Earth Who Wallows Like Its Borrowers?
12. The Shaggy Somnambulists
13. Fiftieth Birthday
14. Portrait of the Artist as an Old Dog
15. Massachusetts Seventeeners
16. To Womanly Beauty in Motion
17. The Day’s No Rounder Than Its Angles Are
18. Athos or Assisi?
19. Four Translation Samples
20. Space-Wanderer’s Homecoming
21. Love Song to Eohippus
22. Is Mary Everybody?
23. Again, Again: The Old Renewed
24. Honorable Daftness
25. Gladness Ode
26. Release
1. Two Elegies
2. The Lost Self
3. Modbard @ Westciv
4. Tug of War
5. Metapolitics, 1938
6. Straitjacket
7. Ballad of Maggie Jones
8. Lot’s Wife
9. Now That Holocaust and Crucifixion Are Coffee-Table Books
10. Two Tombwomb Poems
11. Line against Circle
12. Kilroy
14. In Awe of Marriage
15. Last Day of Childhood
17. Finis: The Old Adam
18. Like Boaz
Part III. The Planted Poet: (Old Long Poems, 1944–1966)
1. The Planted Poet
2. Antistrophe to “The Planted Poet”
3. To My Underwater Moon
4. Dance of the Haemophiliacs
5. For Two Girls Setting Out in Life
6. Coming Attractions
7. Hard Times Redeemed by Soft Discarded Values
8. Crass Times Redeemed by Dignity of Souls
9. Decorum and Terror
Part IV. The Green Menagerie
2. The Persimmon Tree
3. Vegetable Frenzies
4. The Insulted and the Injured
5. I Alone Am Moving
6. The Slacker Apologizes
7. My Gentlest Song
8. Paysage Moralisé
9. To My Playmate, with Thanks for All Those Carefree Days Together
10. The Delphic Gallows-Oak
11. Saga
12. I Am an Old Town-Square
13. River: The First Morning
14. Snow against Rain
15. Leaf-Drift Rhythms
16. Tuscan Loam
17. Tree Ballad
Part V. Walks
1. Stanzas in Love with Life and August
2. A Walk on Moss
A. Stanzas of an Old Unrest
C. Castel Sant’ Angelo
D. Frutta di Stagione
A. The Entropy Song
B. A Wreath for a Plunge
C. More Wing Than Wings Can Bear
D. Last Walk: Resist
Part VI. Tide and Completions
1. Tide
2. Crossbow
3. Persephone and Old Poet
Bibliography