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Lying on the floor

mistranslation after “Fellah” by Taha Muhammad Ali   You: Beethoven I mean to say: Mr. Beethoven I don’t get it: I spend the day removing obstacles, Me and all my neighbors, we’ve covered all the bases But behind our backs, on the phone, the sun still going up and down There are those who hurt…

How I get through the day

“True singing is a different breath.” from Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus   I lift the dark blotter to the world and walk under. There is a coolness here I wouldn’t have expected to be such relief. Everything is at stake. A mirage of my life as I want it to be, whole and breathing, fills…

The Bones of Love

"To be taken in everywhere is to see the inside of everything. It is the hospitality of circumstance." —G. K. Chesterton   Before the Flood, before the Hurricane, before the Twin Towers crumpled to dust and the glaciers thawed and the world picked up its heretofore plodding pace toward Doom…before BlackBerries, before iPods, before that…

The blue sea

the green road is long and deep into the mountain eventually it meets the blue sea you are the feet that deep independently I wish I could show you the way I the rich blue bells and ringing the glass stretched out with your father, the sea but the green road longs for you independent…

Come What May

giving over my mode au naturel pure or polluted as I await the unveiling of night’s recycled poetry which resembles our backstory softly rendered contrary for my part so as to make, to mourn to point nude abidance toward freewheeling echo flux that said, we recognize some lucid continuum innermost thoughts taming a restless amnesia…

The Fly

The fly knows when I give up waiting for him to land and go back to my book. Then when I am in the middle of a stanza or line he returns, and just before I am again aware of his air-brake touch, he has bitten me; I am jerked from the poem and the…

When Young: Unpainted Masks

The faces changing in the rooms’ changing light were just the beginning of stories, unwritten, untold, hardly imagined, whose flickering hid promises of the expected, of loves, of works to come, deeper in the plot, and the edge of thinking pressed against the heart like an argument, its rupture, loss of blood, the near-death scene,…

XXIII

The mask tires of itself. The beautiful dream blown again. The world won’t shake its own hand. Air fills with bone- powder, hair-lint, blood-flecks or the body’s demolished light, shattered mid-thought, mid-stance, mid- breath, mid-word, mid-kiss. Can thinking wend a way back to where the body feels? To where it quivers, retracts, roots? Mind discontinues…

Salt

She had lived in the best cities of the United States and Europe, in the best times, but at age fifty-eight, she’d ended up near a small college town in western New York State that was so rural there were more coyotes than people. And so poor that between the two, the coyotes were the…