SST - Norman MacCaig Flashcards
“The dwarf with his hands on backwards”
Assisi
“slumped like a half-filled sack on tiny twisted legs from which sawdust might run”
Assisi
“outside the three tiers of churches built in honour of St Francis”
Assisi
“he had the advantage of not being dead yet.”
Assisi
“A priest explained how clever it was of Giotto”
Assisi
“I understood the explanation and the cleverness”
Assisi
“A rush of tourists, clucking contentedly, fluttered after him as he scattered the grain of the Word.”
Assisi
“It was they who passed the ruined temple outside”
Assisi
“said Grazie in a voice as sweet as a child’s when she speaks to her mother”
Assisi
“What seems a corpse is trundled into a lift and vanishes heavenward”
Visiting Hour
“I will not feel, I will not feel, until I have to.”
Visiting Hour
“their eyes still clear after so many farewells”
Visiting Hour
“She lies in a white cave of forgetfulness”
Visiting Hour
“A withered hand trembles on its stalk”
Visiting Hour
“And between her and me distance shrinks till there is none left but the distance that neither she nor I can cross”
Visiting Hour
“leaving behind only books that will not be read and fruitless fruits”
Visiting Hour
“Built like a gorilla but less timid”
Brooklyn Cop
“with two hieroglyphs in his face that mean trouble”
Brooklyn Cop
“he walks the sidewalk and the tissue over violence”
Brooklyn Cop
“what clubbings, what gunshots between Phoebe’s Whamburger and Louie’s Place”
Brooklyn Cop
“Gorilla with a nightstick”
Brooklyn Cop
“whose home is a place he might, this time, never get back to?”
Brooklyn Cop
“And who would be who have to be his victims?”
Brooklyn Cop
“To stub an oar on a rock where none should be”
Basking Shark
“To have it rise with a slounge out of the sea”
Basking Shark
“Is a thing that happened once (too often) to me”
Basking Shark
“But not too often- though enough. I count as gain”
Basking Shark
“That roomsized monster with a matchbox brain”
Basking Shark
“He displaced more than water. He shoggled me”
Basking Shark
“So who’s the monster?”
Basking Shark
“a helicopter skirting like a damaged insect”
Hotel Room, 12th Floor
“the glittering canyons and gulches”
Hotel Room, 12th Floor
