(lyrics adapted from robert lowell's brilliant "fall 1961.")


"back and forth and back and forth
Goes the tock of the orange, bland, ambassadorial
Face of the moon on the grandfather clock.
All autumn long, the chafe and jar of dirty bomb
We have talked ourselves to death.
I swim like a minnow
Behind my studio window.
Our end drifts nearer,
The moon lifts,
Radiant with terror.
The state
Is a diver under a glass bell. ..."
A father's no shield
For his child.
We are like a lot of wild
Spiders crying together,
But without tears."