Five ravens climbed a redwood, hopping from one limb to another. They could have flown to the top of the tree, but they took their time, and stopped to preen before jumping to the next branch. The woodpeckers, who’d hectored the ravens all morning, sat in another tree and watched the ravens as they made…
In the woods, hunting mushrooms, I saw a flash of white, and thought Amanita, Death Cap, but it was just a piece of paper. When I picked it up, I recognized my own handwriting. It was a note I must have written months before and dropped. Waterlogged and half-eaten by slugs, the ink was faded,…
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones I tried to save as many of them as possible from the fire of impressions, from the ship going to the bottom of memory, where the guard is kept by electric fishes. Most were asleep, so the dying lasted as long as a breath. This was my battle for continuity,…
Reprinted with newly restored content from Issue 11 of Ploughshares, Spring 1977 (guest-edited by Jane Shore and DeWitt Henry) A gray late afternoon in winter. Elizabeth Bishop, dressed casually in a Harvard jersey, welcomes the interviewer and answers his polite questions about a gorgeous gilt mirror on her living room wall. Yes, it is Venetian,…
The boss wears a white vest a white face through the hole of a white vest the boss keeps her body heat in the white vest 700-fill-power down power down the boss the boss keeps her power her power is down today the boss’s new boss doesn’t like her the boss’s old boss doesn’t like…
Before this dream there is a blue dress, a tangle of trees and the distance between voices. There is routine sorting of like things: bank statements, unopened letters, photographs turned inward from the damp. There are cows in clusters, truck stops, cinder block churches, scattered tractors and fields cleared and flooded. Before this dream there…
The genie says build a studio. I build a studio from ash. I make it out of peril and slum things. I alone when blood and bullet and all Christ-fucking-’Merican-dollar politicians talk the pressure down to nothing, when the equator’s confused and coke bubbles on tinfoil to cemented wreath. I build it, a Congo drum,…
is not a man being swallowed by a fish ? with eyes like eight-point throwing stars it’s a man being swallowed by a war a man being taken into the mouth of a woman or being swallowed by his work? it’s a man traveling far inside a book a man being swallowed up in smoke…
Last night I dreamed I was in Mexico. I saw my ex-wife’s—second wife’s—hacienda. I saw her dead husband dancing with Indians. He’d lost weight because he couldn’t eat. “The stitches in my stomach have popped open!” he cried. The bartender said, “There’s nothing I can do about it,” But you could tell by the tone…
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