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AGNES:

I feel at home.

My friends like it here,

better that their own apartments.

I’m not a fool.

I know that what’s coming

will be bad,

but not unlivable,

and not eternally,

and when it’s over, I will have clung to the least last thing,

which is to say, my lease.

And you have to admit, it’s a terrific apartment.

I could never find anything like it if I moved out now.

You would not believe

how low the rent is.

(End of scene.)

Slide: JANUARY 30, 1933.

Slide: PRESIDENT HINDENBURG

Slide: APPPOINTS ADOLF HITLER

Slide: CHANCELLOR OF THE GERMAN REICH.

Even as they entered, he could feel the place envelop him like a vapor with a smell of heavy, overcooked food, privation and dust. The lady taking tickets, old and wigged, with big bosoms, conspicuously switched from Yiddish to German, putting the interlopers on notice that they had been spotted. Eyeing the overblown placard for the play, showing a giant Jew with maniacal eyes throttling some stricken Gentile, he again wondered, Why did they huddle so, these people? And all the while he kept hearing this coarse, splattery jargon, so animated, with that catarrh as though a fishbone were stuck in the throat. There was a man selling hot tea from a samovar and another vending sticky cakes and ices. And the eating—everybody eating, gnawing apples and chewing sweet crackling dumplings from greasy sheets of brown paper. And that marshy barn-warmth of people huddling. It was too close for him.

I live brokenly and assemble together

Weakly – from long bone of the arm, hip

Rollicking in its socket, and the jaw,

Its brux. From the lip of a wooden

Bowl carved from the knot of a limb

Drifted, my name was given on water

And laid down like hail upon my tongue.

It’s become a bewilderment of white –

It snows. It does snow. It is snowing.

The bluet is a small flower, creamy-throated, that grows in patches in New England lawns. The bluet (French pronunciation) is the shaggy cornflower, growing wild in France. “The Bluet” is a poem I wrote. The Bluet is a painting of Joan Mitchell’s. The thick hard blue runs and holds. All of the, broken-up pieces of sky, hard sky, soft sky. Today I’ll take Joan’s giant vision, running and holding, staring you down with beauty. Though I need reject none. Bluet. “Bloo-ay.”

A man and a woman

are lying together

listening to news of a war.

The radio dial

is the only light in the room.

Casualties are read out.

He thinks, “Those are people

I no longer have to love,”

and he touches her hair

and calls her name

but it sounds strange to her

like a stone left over

from a house already built.