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Summary:

Using direct address the speaker has been reading the newspaper and begins the poem, "Already you’re on Page 8," to signify the ease with which "that large animal The Public General" forgets such a horror as the beating death of the little girl, Elizabeth Steinberg. The speaker asks who will remember the child, "or consider the big fists breaking your little bones, / or consider the vague bureaucrats / stumbling, fumbling through Paper."

The speaker ruminates on why she is "sick" when she thinks of her, telling her that "We cannot help you," but that "If you are Somewhere, and sentient, / be comforted, little spirit" because she helps "us begin to hear the scream out of the twisted mouth." Elizabeth’s death will motivate the community, the speaker insists (hopes?), to "stomp into the Horror Houses, / invade the caves of the monsters."

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Summary:

This poem describes the lifestyle of young rebels. They are "cool," having "left school," and enjoy themselves being bad. Although this gang is busy living life, they also realize that they "die soon."

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The speaker begins by declaring that "Abortions will not let you forget," and goes on to problematize the question of aborted life. These are "singers and workers who never handled the air" and whom the mother ("you") "will never scuttle off ghosts that come." The speaker has heard in the wind the voices of her "dim killed children" and has suffered because of it.

She unequivocally looks at the fact that the children have been killed, cut off from life before having a chance to experience it. The speaker meditates (in direct address to the children) on the "crime" and whether it was hers or not, saying that "even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate," and declaring that despite her having "stolen" their births and names, that "I loved you all."

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Summary:

This short poem, one of a series entitled "A Catch of Shy Fish," describes an old sick man whose life is "closing in" and who feels only pain ("mind is a little isle") until there enters "an impudence of red," flowers that, for him become a "ripe rebuke," a "burgeoning affluence" that "mocks [him] and "mocks the desert of my bed."

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