Contents
The Bitter Part of Heaven
The Perils of Beauty
The Comeback of Yma Sumac
Cancer Talkers
Upon Reading in the Newspaper That a Man in Kentucky Had Cut Off His Hand and His Foot with Pocket Knives and Then Gouged Out an Eye In Order That He Might Go to Heaven
On a Photograph I Found of Two Young Factory Workers Standing beside a Piece of Heavy Machinery and Inscribed on the Reverse “Sacred to the Memory of Friendship”
Remembering Madame Beausoleil, the Science Teacher at St. Dominic’s Boys’ Academy
A Visitation
Definitions
The Correct Answers
The Canticle of End-Times
The K-al-i Yuga
The Wastes of Resurrection
Opie and the Apples
How Little Lillian Found the Lord and Served Him
Jam
How I Tried to Explain the Certainties of Faith and Petrunkevitch’s Famous Essay on the Wasp and the Tarantula to a Pentecostal Student Worried about My Soul
About Their Father’s Business
Expulsions
Baptisms
Conversions
Theological Meditation
Angelic Revelation
Garden Walk after Looking at a Lacquer Box by Zeshin
Flemish Scene
Withdrawal and Return
The Gates of the Elect Kingdom
Shitheads
Reflections on the Progress of the Western Intellectual Tradition from Thales to Crick and Watson
Hunting for a New Chairman; Thinking about Giotto
Professional Dreams
Dreams of Standing
Locomotion and Starlight
Babies on the Beach
Elegy for B. Kliban, Artist, Being a Meditation with Subverted Meaning on the Patron Saint of Crullers
Star Washer
The Last Model
Odysseys of Desire and Thoughts of Cavafy
Silage
The Myths of Meanness
Bees
Remembering My Father Riding
For My Father
Thinking of My Mother
Snapshots from the Fifties
Remembering a Young Poet I’d Known in College
Elegiac Stanza on a Photograph of Ethel Rosenberg in Her Kitchen
Elegy
Elegy in September
Elegiac Ode
The Bathers
Flowers for Robert Mapplethorpe
The Mysteries: Elegy at Century’s Close
The Testament of the Saints: Fragments from a Requiem for Ronald Firbank
Thinking of Maria Theresa Broussard, a Pregnant Girl in My Freshman Class My First Semester in Louisiana
For a Friend Whose Son Committed Suicide
Weights and Measures
Seeing a Girl Who Looked like a Well-Known Child Actress Walking Toward San Tomé, the Church in Toledo Where El Greco’s Burial of the Count of Orgaz Hangs
Meditative Stanzas: On Stanley Spencer
Sacred Celebrations for the Moon’s Beginning: Five Menarcheal Songs with Epigraphs from St. Simeon
The Honey of Hellas
"I dream of perfect forms..."
Homage to Dafydd ap Gwilym
Here in Louisiana
Voyages into Summer
In Silver Season
The Surrounding Grace
A Crown of Promise
Gifts
Written on My Fiftieth Birthday
The Song That You Are Watching
Spring Wind: Meditation on a Line from the Ninth Eclogue of Virgil and a Contrary Meditation on a Line from Whitman
In Primary Light
Self Portrait after Stanley Spencer
Notes on the Poems