Born, May 22, 1956. Lucie Brock-Broido is the author of an earlier book of poems, A Hunger (1988). From 1988 to 1993 she was a Briggs-Copeland poet at Harvard University. She has taught also at the Bennington Writing Seminars and at Princeton University, and is now director of poetry in the Writing Division in the School of the Arts at Columbia University. She lives in New York City and in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
FRAGMENT ON DISSEMBLING
Lucie Brock-Broido
Curious in your dark
Frock-coat, do everything
That you have to,
If it is time;
Leave nothing
Still unsaid.
Once, to make of nothing
Something, was divine.
To have made
Of something
Nothing, was sublime.
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SELF-PORTRAIT WITH HER HAIR ON FIRE
Lucie Brock-Broido
Now, it is as dark as the pathos of pushing a wheel-
Chair through the museum of a great metropolis.
I cannot tell you this, not now, not ever, even
In the letter I have written that is so epic
That if you were to open it, the pages would sail out
In the wind like confection moths being born
In the thousands out of their sacks, blowing
Away, page by page, in a wind the color of her hair
Across a medieval pillow endlessly scorched,
The singe of something living tinged with fire.
I will go on loving as I love the backs
Of things and the invisible,
As I love the hideous or an attention
So attentive it is next to worshiping.