Quiet Life
I spent the last year avoiding people who announce the forms they write in. My life calmed. Became less try-hard. Son, I want that for you— A careful economy of sound decisions
Article
Silence
Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence….
Correspondences
Translated by Carolyn Forché This is the sign for “human” and this is the sign for “god.” This is the thought that life actually lies outside the one who lives it—yes, that life would continue even if we did not do so, as if it were a large tenement where some move in and…
Alba
Translated by Carolyn Forché The curtain moved gently, dawn spilled milk over the city. I never saw you again like that.
The School of Knowledge
On the second day, light; on the third, water, then the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, etcetera, until you come to the lesson-centered day you see the Milky Way as the downy drink of morning. You’re ever aware of the shared terror of the shy kids souring the air in the classroom. The globe spins…
Paragraph or Paraphernalia: A Story of Breath
Paragraph means “to write beside.” I sit beside myself, writing. I sit beside my brother’s lungs, listening to the hissing oxygen tank he also sits beside, transcribing his story of breath: scraping, wet, sticky, low. I write beside his slow strangling, struggling to inhale even when he is sitting still. Even when he runs out…
The Poem
For Christian You know it hadn’t a drop to do with love except that if I showed you how salt boiled on each winding stair back into that Baudelairean cellar eaved in velvet, your ear might love mine more for it. Surely I’d gone partly mad but can it have been madness if…
Offering
From Look at This Blue Your palms know where to go. What they imagine leads you. Everything we muster moves us along, like water mirroring itself remembers where to flow, how to go there. In the dream you follow, in the dream we fly over all of this direness float….
prayer for man in accident, elephant and castle
six meters away from a charnel bike you lie with closed lids beneath maw of atmosphere, blessing a forest of gravel, helmet on and face up. three of the rubberneckers on 999 calls, and by your brown body, the towers of people living out a dreamers’ ending of others’ displacement, where smoke…