“No weekends for the gods now. Warsflicker, earth licks its open sores,fresh breakage, fresh promotions, chanceassassinations, no advance.Only man thinning out his own kindsounds through the Sabbath noon, the blindswipe of the pruner and his knifebusy about the tree of life...Pity the planet, all joy gonefrom this sweet volcanic cone;peace to our children when they fallin small war on the heels of smallwar - until the end of timeto police th eearth, a ghostorbiting forever lostin our monotonous sublime.”

“Pity the planet, all joy gonefrom this sweet volcanic cone;peace to our children when they fallin small war on the heel of smallwar--until the end of timeto police the earth, a ghostorbiting forever lostin our monotonous sublime”

“In the end, every hypochondriac is his own prophet.”

“Two months after marching through Boston,half the regiment was dead;at the dedication,William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.Their monument sticks like a fishbonein the city's throat.Its Colonel is as leanas a compass-needle.He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,a greyhound's gently tautness;he seems to wince at pleasure,and suffocate for privacy.He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,peculiar power to choose life and die--when he leads his black soldiers to death,he cannot bend his back.”

“I saw the spiders marching through the air,Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed dayIn latter August when the hayCame creaking to the barn. But whereThe wind is westerly,Where gnarled November makes the spiders flyInto the apparitions of the sky,They purpose nothing but their ease and dieUrgently beating east to sunrise and the sea;”

“My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,a captive as Racine, the man of craft,drawn through his maze of iron compositionby the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre.When I was troubled in mind, you made for my bodycaught in its hangman's-knot of sinking lines,the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. . . .I have sat and listened to too manywords of the collaborating muse,and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,not avoiding injury to others,not avoiding injury to myself--to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction, an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting my eyes have seen what my hand did.”

“I saw the sky descending, black and white,Not blue, on Boston where the winters woreThe skulls to jack-o’-lanterns on the slates,And Hunger’s skin-and-bone retrievers toreThe chickadee and shrike. The thorn tree waitsIts victim and tonightThe worms will eat the deadwood to the footOf Ararat: the scythers, Time and Death,Helmed locusts, move upon the tree of breath;The wild ingrafted olive and the rootAre withered, and a winter drifts to whereThe Pepperpot, ironic rainbow, spansCharles River and its scales of scorched-earth miles.I saw my city in the Scales, the pansOf judgement rising and descending. PilesOf dead leaves char the air—And I am a red arrow on this graphOf Revelations. Every dove is sold.The Chapel’s sharp-shinned eagle shifts its holdOn serpent-Time, the rainbow’s epitaph.In Boston serpents whistle at the cold.The victim climbs the altar steps and sings:“Hosannah to the lion, lamb, and beastWho fans the furnace-face of IS with wings:I breathe the ether of my marriage feast.”At the high altar, goldAnd a fair cloth. I kneel and the wings beatMy cheek. What can the dove of Jesus giveYou now but wisdom, exile? Stand and live,The dove has brought an olive branch to eat.”