Contents

About the Author

Other Books by This Author

Acknowledgments

We Are Listening

The Dark Night of the Hummingbird

On Looking into Sylvia Plath’s Copy of Goethe’s Faust

Halley’s Comet

Hawaiian Storms

St. Louis Botanical Gardens

Dinner at the Waldorf

Night Letter to Loren Eiseley

WHERE THE SUN DINES — POEMS OF AMAZONIA

I In the Rain Forest

III At Brazil, Where the Sun Dines

THE WHITE LANTERN —POEMS OF ANTARCTICA

I Antarctica Considers Her Explorers

II Antarctica Offers Scott Her Lantern

III Song of the Current at Cape Horn

IV King Penguins

V At Belingshausen, the Russian Base, Antarctica

VI When Handling Desolata

TALES FROM A SONNETARIUM

II How like a Virus Entering a Cell

IV Starlight Weaver

VI The White Hypnosis

A Pilot’s Pay

Song of the Trilobite

Lament of the Banyan Tree

Campus Cemetery

Letter to Wallace Stevens

Visiting Professors

Air Show in Barbados

The Manure Gatherers

At Walt Whitman’s Birthplace

In the Green Purse of the Yard This Loose Red Change

Opening the Locket

Letter of Retainer

Come Picnic on Mars

High-Altitude Knitting

Elegy for Challenger

Portrait Without Pose

French Frigate Shoals

FROM THE PLANETS: A COSMIC PASTORAL (1976)

from Earth
When You Take Me from This Good Rich Soil

The Other Night (Comet Kohoutek)

FROM WIFE OF LIGHT (1978)

Ode to an Appaloosa Stallion

George Sand, Addressing Her Mind, at 50

Madame Bovary to Her Lover

Mystic Communion of Clocks

Anne Donne to Her Husband

Sweep Me Through Your Many-Chambered Heart

A.R. Ammons amid the Fungi

Ithaca Without You

Driving Through Farm Country at Sunset

I Should Have Trekked with Scott to Antarctica

Where Paul Was Born

Curtains of Goldenrod

Of Course the Earth Won’t Stop

Trelawny Parish, Jamaica

Ode to the Alien

FROM LADY FAUSTUS (1983)

A Fine, a Private Place

Freeing the Evergreens

A Red Carillon Whose Berries Are Bells

Sleeping Beauty of the Bronx

In a Science-Illustrator’s Apartment

To Villa-Lobos in Winter

Patrick Ewing Takes a Foul Shot

In a Philosopher’s Cottage

Lines Written in a Pittsburgh Skyscraper

The Rumored Conversation with Oneself Continues in Pittsburgh

Soccer at the Meadowlands

Golden Section, Giants Stadium

FROM REVERSE THUNDER (1988)

Sister Juana Inès de la Cruz, Hearing that Her Lover, Giorgio, Has Drowned

The Archbishop of Puebla Weighs Sister Juana Inès de la Cruz’s Passion for Study

An Italian Courtier Pines for His Mistress, the Learned Nun, Sister Juana Inès de la Cruz