j Contents
Editors’ Notes xxiii
Acknowledgments xxix
Introduction xxxiii
Theory of Flight ()
 Poem Out of Childhood
Poem Out of Childhood 
Song for Dead Children 
In a Dark House 
Effort at Speech between Two People 
Notes for a Poem 
Place-Rituals 
Tradition of This Acre 
Ritual of Blessing 
Wooden Spring 
Sonnet 
Letter, Unposted 
Sand-Quarry with Moving Figures 
Wedding Presents 
Three Sides of a Coin 
Breathing Landscape 
Four in a Family 
This House,This Country 
 Theory of Flight
Preamble 
The Gyroscope 
The Lynchings of Jesus 
 Passage to Godhead 
 The Committee-Room 
 The Trial 
The Tunnel 
The Structure of the Plane 
 The Structure of the Plane 
 The Strike 
 The Lover 
Night Flight : New York 
Theory of Flight 
vii j
 The Blood Is Justified
For Memory 
Life and Works 
Holy Dying 
Ritual for Death 
City of Monuments 
Study in a Late Subway 
Child and Mother 
Eccentric Motion 
Sundays,They Sleep Late 
Thousands of Days 
The Surrounded 
Burlesque 
Movie 
Metaphor to Action 
Citation for Horace Gregory 
Cats and a Cock 
The Blood Is Justified 
U.S.  ()
 The Book of the Dead
The Road 
West Virginia 
Statement: Phillippa Allen 
Gauley Bridge 
The Face of the Dam: Vivian Jones
Praise of the Committee 
Mearl Blankenship 
Absalom 
The Disease 
George Robinson: Blues 
Juanita Tinsley 
The Doctors 
The Cornfield 
Arthur Peyton 
Alloy 
Power 
The Dam 
The Disease:After-Effects 
The Bill 
The Book of the Dead 
j viii Contents

 Night-Music
A Flashing Cliff 
Girl at the Play 
Burning Bush 
Eel 
Homage to Literature 
The Handclap 
Trophies 
Panacea 
In Hades, Orpheus 
The Drowning Young Man 
Boy with His Hair Cut Short 
Course 
More of a Corpse than a Woman 
Three Black Women 
Formosa 
Night-Music 
Time Exposures 
The Child Asleep 
Adventures, Midnight 
Night-Music 
Driveway 
Lover as Fox 
Gift-Poem 
Woman and Emblems 
Woman and Bird 
The Birthday 
Woman and Music 
Outpost 
 Two Voyages
The Cruise 
Mediterranean 
A Turning Wind ()
 Moment of Proof
Reading Time :  Minute  Seconds
Song, the Brain-Coral 
Target Practice 
Otherworld 
Landing at Liverpool 
The Island 

Contents
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Otherworld 
Nuns in the Wind 
For Fun 
Correspondences 
Democritus Laughed 
Tree of Days 
// 
Correspondences 
Noguchi 
Seventh Avenue 
The Shortest Way Home 
Palos Verdes Cliffs 
Paper Anniversary 
From the Duck-Pond to the Carousel 
Asylum Song 
The Victims, a Play for the Home 
M-Day’s Child 
Speech for the Assistant, from Houdini 
Judith 
 Lives
“The risen image shines, its force escapes, we are all named”
Gibbs 
Ryder 
Chapman 
Ann Burlak 
Ives 
Wake Island () 
Beast in View ()
One Soldier

 Beast in View
Ajanta 
 The Journey 
 The Cave 
 Les Tendresses Bestiales 
 Black Blood 
 The Broken World 
Mortal Girl 
Child in the Great Wood 
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
The Meeting 
The Key 
Darkness Music 
Song 
Shooting Gallery 
Suicide Blues 
Wreath of Women 
Madboy’s Song 
Drunken Girl 
Love and Its Doors and Windows 
The Minotaur 
Gift-Poem 
Holy Family 
Who in One Lifetime 
from “To the Unborn Child” 
Leg in a Plaster Cast 
Bubble of Air 
Sea Mercy 
Long Past Moncada 
Chapultepec Park— 
Chapultepec Park— 
A Game of Ball 
Gold Leaf 
All Souls 
Evening Plaza, San Miguel 
Beast in View 

Letter to the Front

 “Women and poets see the truth arrive” 
 “Even during war, moments of delicate peace” 
 “They called us to a change of heart” 
 Sestina 
 “Much later, I lie in a white seaport night” 
 “Home thoughts from home; we read you every day” 
 “To be a Jew in the twentieth century” 
 “Evening, bringing me out of the government building” 
 “Among all the waste there are the intense stories” 
 “Surely it is time for the true grace of women” 

The Soul and Body of John Brown

Contents
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The Green Wave ()

Water Night 
Eyes of Night-Time 
This Place in the Ways 
Song, from “Mr.Amazeen on the River” 
Cloud,Airs, Carried Me Away 
Salamander 
His Head Is Full of Faces 
Mrs.Walpurga 
A Certain Music 
The Motive of All of It 
Green Limits 
The Children’s Orchard 
Christmas Eve 
Crayon House 
A Charm for Cantinflas 
Traditional Tune 
Foghorn in Horror 
Summer, the Sacramento 
Speech of the Mother, from The Middle of the Air
Then I Saw What the Calling Was 
“Let poems and bodies love and be given to air”
Translations: Six Poems by Octavio Paz
The Bird 
Poet’s Epitaph 
Spark 
Two Bodies 
The Street 
Lovers 
Rari from the Marquesas
Rari for Tahia and Piu 
Rari for O’Otua 
A True Confession 
Careful of the Day 
Rari for Hepuheku 
Rari 
Rari to Encourage Youth 
Rari, to Be Bothered by Mosquitoes
Not Before I Fall Asleep 
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

Easter Eve 
Easter Eve  
Private Life of the Sphinx 
Nine Poems for the unborn child

Orpheus () 
Elegies ()
First Elegy. Rotten Lake 
Second Elegy. Age of Magicians 
Third Elegy. The Fear of Form 
Fourth Elegy. The Refugees 
Fifth Elegy. A Turning Wind 
Sixth Elegy. River Elegy 
Seventh Elegy. Dream-Singing Elegy 
Eighth Elegy. Children’s Elegy 
Ninth Elegy. The Antagonists 
Tenth Elegy. Elegy in Joy 
Body of Waking ()

Haying Before Storm 
Phaneron 
The Young Girl of the Mississippi Valley
A Birth 
King’s Mountain 
Mother Garden’s Round 
Rite 
Ringling 
After Their Quarrel 
Tree 
Night Feeding 
The Return 
Unborn Song 
The Two Illuminations 
F. O. M. 
Exile of Music 
On the Death of Her Mother 
“Make and be eaten, the poet says” 
Hero Speech 
The Watchers 

Contents
xiii j
A Ballad Theme 
Asleep and Awake 
Of Money.And the Past.


“Long enough. Long enough”
The Loan 
Pouring Milk Away 
Children, the Sandbar, that Summer
Born in December 
The Sixth Night:Waking 
Nevertheless the Moon 
Speed,We Say 
The Birth of Venus 
The Place at Alert Bay 
Voices of Waking 
Divining Water 

 Translations: Octavio Paz
“The hand of day opens”

“At daybreak go looking for your newborn name”

Fable 
Day 
Proverbs 
“In her splendor islanded” 
“Like ivy the creeper with a thousand hands”

Life of the Poet 
The Prisoner 
from Sun Stone 

Suite for Lord Timothy Dexter 
 “They face us in sea-noon sun, just
as he saw them waiting” 
 How to Impress Massachusetts 
 Three Nights I Dreamed 
 Kings and Contemporaries 
 The Pickle, the Temple 
 The Kind of Woman 
 Guessing Time 

Are You Born?—I

“Murmurs from the earth of this land, from the caves and craters”
“The tree of rivers seen and forgotten” 
“The power of war leads to a plan of lives” 
j xiv Contents

“A tree of rivers flowing through our lives” 
“The sea has opened, the limit of his dream” 
Powerplant


Fields Where We Slept 
Portrait of a Man, with a Background of Holdings 
“A red bridge fastening this city to the forest” 
“Power never dominion” 
“The sky is as black as it was when you lay down” 
“On your journey you will come to a time of waking” 
“This is the net of begetting and belief ” 
Body of Waking 
“Sounds of night in the country of the opposites” 
Willkie in The Gulliver 
“Then full awake you will recognize the voice” 
“In your time, there have been those who spoke clearly” 
He Had a Quality of Growth 
Are You Born?— 
“In the last hour of night, a zebra racing dawn”
Waterlily Fire ()
The Speaking Tree 
To Enter That Rhythm Where the Self Is Lost
For a Mexican Painter 
A Song of Another Tribe 
Song 
Waterlily Fire 
 The Burning 
 The Island 
 Journey Changes 
 Fragile 
 The Long Body 

The Speed of Darkness ()
 Clues
The Poem as Mask 
Orpheus 
What Do I Give You? 
The Transgress 
The Conjugation of the Paramecium
Junk-Heap at Murano 
Clues 
In Our Time 

Contents
xv j
Double Dialogue: 417
Homage to Robert Frost 
The Six Canons 
Forerunners 
Orgy 
The Overthrow of One O’Clock at Night 
Among Roses 
What I See 
Believing in Those Inexorable Laws 
Song : Love in Whose Rich Honor 
Niobe Now 
Song : The Star in the Nets of Heaven 
Air 
Gift 
Cries from Chiapas 
The War Comes into My Room 
Delta Poems 
Spirals and Fugues 
Anemone 
Fighting for Roses 
For My Son 
Poem 
The Power of Suicide 
The Seeming 
Song from Puck Fair 
Not Yet 
Landscape with Wave Approaching 
Segre Song 
Bunk Johnson Blowing 
Cannibal Bratuscha 
What Have You Brought Home from the Wars? 
One Month 
Silence of Volcanoes 
What They Said 
A Little Stone in the Middle of the Road, in Florida 
The Blue Flower 
Woman as Market 
Forgetting and Remembering 
Word of Mouth 
 The Return 
 Word of Mouth 
Endless 
j xvi Contents
 Games
The Backside of the Academy 
Mountain : One from Bryant 
The Flying Red Horse 

The Outer Banks

 Lives
Akiba

The Way Out 
for the Song of Songs 
The Bonds 
Akiba Martyr 
The Witness 
Käthe Kollwitz 
 “Held between wars” 
 “Woman as gates, saying” 
 “Held among wars, watching” 
 Song : The Calling-Up 
 Self-Portrait 

The Speed of Darkness

Breaking Open ()
 Searching / Not Searching
Waking This Morning 
Despisals 
What Do We See? 
Looking at Each Other 
Desdichada 
Voices 
Fire 
Waiting for Icarus 
from City of Paradise 
The Question 
In Her Burning 
Rondel 
More Clues 
Myth 
Searching / Not Searching 
 “What kind of woman goes searching
and searching?” 
Contents
xvii j
 Miriam : The Red Sea 
 For Dolci 
 Concrete 
 Brecht’s Galileo 
 Reading the Kieu 
 The Floor of Ocean 
 H. F. D. 
 The Artist as Social Critic 
 The President and the Laser Bomb 
 Not Searching 
 The Question 
 “Searching/not searching. To make closeness” 
 “What did I see? What did I not see?” 
A Simple Experiment 
Along History 
Boys of These Men Full Speed 
All the Little Animals 
Next 
Two Years 
Iris 
 Orange and Grape
Ballad of Orange and Grape 
Rock Flow, River Mix 
Martin Luther King, Malcolm X 
Looking 
Don Baty, the Draft Resister 
Te Hanh : Long-Ago Garden 
Welcome from War 
Facing Sentencing 
Secrets of American Civilization 
Wherever 
Bringing 
A Louis Sonnet 
After Melville 
The Writer 
Gradus Ad Parnassum 
From a Play : Publisher’s Song 
In the Night the Sound Woke Us 
In the Underworld 
Afterwards 
Flying to Hanoi 
It Is There 
j xviii Contents
The Running of the Grunion
Sacred Lake 

 Northern Poems
Songs of the Barren Grounds 
 The Old Days 
 Inland,Away 
 I’m Here Again 
 Not Much Good 
 My Breath 
I Recognize This Song 
The Black Ones, the Great Ones 
Trout Fishing 
How Lovely It Is 
The Word-Fisher 
Stroking Songs 
A Girl for a Boy—Stroking Song 
The Baby on the Mountain—Stroking Song 
The Wiping Moss from the Ruins 
Stroking Songs, Childhood Songs 
Being Born 
Shooting Star 

Breaking Open 
Columbus 
Burning the Dreams 
Death and the Dancer 
Rational Man 
The Hostages 
The Gates ()

St. Roach 
Dream-Drumming 
Double Ode 
Painters 
Rune 
How We Did It 
Islands 
Blue Spruce 
Artifact 
Ms. Lot 
Contents
xix j
Boys in the Branches 
Song : Lying in Daylight 
Hypnogogic Figure 
The Lost Romans 
Canal 
For Kay Boyle 
Resurrection of the Right Side 
The Wards 
The Sun-Artist 
Poem White Page White Page Poem 
Fable 
Neruda, the Wine 
Before Danger 
Song : Remembering Movies 
Work, for the Day Is Coming 
Recovering 
Parallel Invention 
Poem 
Not to Be Printed, Not to Be Said, Not to Be Thought
Back Tooth 
Destruction of Grief 
Trinity Churchyard 
Burnishing, Oakland 
The Iris-Eaters 
Slow Death of the Dragon 
Mendings 
Then 


The Gates












j xx Contents

“Waiting to leave all day I hear the words” 
“Walking the world to find the poet of these cries” 
New Friends 
“The Cabinet minister speaks of liberation 
“Among the days” 
The Church of Galilee 
The Dream of Galilee 
Mother as Pitchfork 
“You grief woman you gave me a scarlet coverlet” 
“Air fills with fear and the kinds of fear” 
“Long ago, soon after my son’s birth” 
“For that I cannot name the names” 
 “Crucified child—is he crucified?
he is tortured” 
 “So I became very dark very large” 
 “All day the rain” 
Juvenilia
Antigone 
Cities of the Morning 
Autumn in the Garden 
The Ballad of the Missing Lines 
November Sketches 
To a Lady Turning Middle-Aged 
Place-Poems: New York 
O City 
Fourteenth Street 
The New School for Social Research 
Sheridan Square Conversation 
The New Bridge 
Park Avenue 
College Special 
Empire State Tower 
“Dear place, sweet home” 
For an Aesthete 
Pastorale No.  
A New Poem
An Unborn Poet

Abbreviations 
Annotations 
Textual Notes 
Bibliography 
Index of Titles 
Index of First Lines 
Contents
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