Frederick Seidel

A stag lifts his nostrils to the morning In the crosshairs of the scope of love, And smells what the gun calls Scotland and falls. The meat of geology raw is Scotland: Stone Age hours of stalking, passionate aim for the heart, Bleak dazzling weather of the bare and green. Old men in kilts, their beards are lobster-red. Red pubic hair of virgins white as cows. Omega under Alpha, rock hymen, fog penis – The unshaved glow of her underarms is the sky Of prehistory or after the sun expands.

The endangered bald eagle is soaring Away from extinction, according to the evening news – Good news after the news, after The stocking masks and the blindfolds, Contorted and disfigured nature in the dying days of oil. What a surprise happy ending for the half hour. Eagles airlift above the timberline – cut to Their chicks nesting in the rocks.

The TV anchorman who predigests it...

Cold drool on his chin, warm drool in his lap, a sigh, The bitterness of too many cigarettes On his breath: portrait of the autist Asleep in the arms of his armchair, age thirteen, Dizzily starting to wake just as the sun Is setting. The room is already dark while outside Rosewater streams from a broken yolk of blood.

All he has to do to sleep is open A book; but the wet dream...

I look at Broadway in the bitter cold, The centre strip benches empty like today, And see St Louis. I am often old Enough to leave my childhood, but I stay.

A winter sky as total as repression Above a street the colour of the sky; A sky the same gray as a deep depression; A boulevard the colour of a sigh:

Where Waterman and Union met was the Apartment building I’m regressing to. My key...

I could only dream, I could never draw, In Art with the terrifying Mrs Jaspar Whom I would have done anything to please. Aquiline and aloof in the land of the button nose, her smile Made her seem a witch, my goddess, Too cool, too cold. She was my muse Because she hardly spoke a word.

We used to pronounce her name to rhyme with Casbah, Mimicking her fahncy Locust Valley lockjaw. Say Christ...