I AM the nigger. Singer of songs, Dancer. . . Softer than fluff of cotton. . . Harder than dark earth

MRS. GABRIELLE GIOVANNI… every morning at nine o’clock With kindling wood piled on top of… looking straight ahead to find the… Her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Pietro…

ON the one hand the steel works. On the other hand the penitentiary… Sante Fé trains and Alton trains Between smokestacks on the west And gray walls on the east.

EARLY May, after cold rain the… Irish setter pup finds a corner ne… Cuddling there he crosses forepaws… Sideways on this pillow, dozing in… Browns of hazel nut, mahogany, ros…

AMONG the shadows where two stre… A woman lurks in the dark and wait… To move on when a policeman heaves… Smiling a broken smile from a face Painted over haggard bones and des…

AMONG the grassroots In the moonlight, who comes circli… red tongues and high noses? Is one of ‘em Buck and one of ’em White Fang?

BORN a million years ago you sta… watching the women come and live a… you and they thin-gray thin-dusk l… So it goes: either the early morni… I am glad I have seen racehorses,…

RED drips from my chin where I h… Not all the blood, nowhere near al… Clots of red mess my hair And the tiger, the buffalo, know h… I was a killer.

BILBEA, I was in Babylon on Sa… I saw nothing of you anywhere. I was at the old place and the oth… Have you gone to another house? or… Why don’t you write?

I have seen The old gods go And the new gods come. Day by day And year by year

‘I KNEW a real man once,’ says… Did a man touch his lips to Agath… Agatha, far past forty in a splend…

BECAUSE I have called to you as the flame flamingo calls, or the want of a spotted hawk is called– because in the dusk

She had a box with a million red bandanas for hi… She gave them to him one by one or by thousands, saying then she had not enough for…

BLOSSOMS of babies Blinking their stories Come soft On the dusk and the babble; Little red gamblers,

WHAT cry of peach blossoms let loose on the air today I heard with my face thrown in the pink-white of it all? in the red whisper of it all?