Lucie Brock-Broido


LUCIE BROCK-BROIDO obituary, Cambridge, MA


 You Have Harnessed Yourself Ridiculously to This World

 
 
Tell the truth I told me                                When I couldn’t speak.
 
Sorrow’s a barbaric art, crude as a Viking ship                Or a child
 
Who rode a spotted pony to the lake away from summer 
 
In the 1930s                                       Toward the iron lung of polio.
 
According to the census I am unmarried                And unchurched.
 
                                    The woman in the field dressed only in the sun.
 
Too far gone to halt the Arctic Cap’s catastrophe, big beautiful
 
Blubbery white bears each clinging to his one last hunk of  ice.
 
I am obliged, now, to refrain from dying, for as long as it is possible.
 
For whom left am I first?
 
                                                          We have come to terms with our Self
 
Like a marmoset getting out of  her Great Ape suit.

John Ashbery

  The New Spirit (excerpt) I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave a...