Mackey Conlon didn’t believe in God or science. She believed in patterns in the world you had to be sharp enough to catch. Feelings you had to be open enough to feel. She wasn’t one of those crunchy freaks; she just believed in the ability to see things for yourself. Who else was going to…
A spider webbed the cellar doorway the morning of my cleaning spree, pale star with him floating at the center. And for all his meanness, bigness, blackness, I let him be, having once squashed ants, crushed butterflies, stalking field and sidewalk. Love, come late in life, had softened all my anger. His net spanned half …
An Adirondack chair, painted in a primary color, in one corner, under the pergola, the blooming vine appealing above—people an abundance of themselves, prodigal in sunglasses, in the shade. Will I speak to him, and if so, do I call him “Mr. Secretary”? He groans into his chair, opens the Times, reads, then glances at…
translated by Clare Cavanagh This year I bore no fruit, just leaves that give no shadows I am afraid, Rabbi, I am afraid, Lord, that I’ll be cursed by him who hungers, weary on the endless road to Jerusalem
translated by Kirk Nesset I’ll be an easy cadaver to carry through woods and over the sea; in a carriage, on a white ship, as the oboe laments, or bassoon, over the droning croaking of toads. I’ll be an innocent cadaver, quietly regarding my remains, while despite me a requiem sounds, the moan of a…
Basho neither trusted nor distrusted the reeds. He was simply a poet on the way north. And being on the way north, he could choose to ignore them. That sound, after all— wind through them—was not the voice of a master. If there had been a master once, he was gone. Ah, to have loved…
translated by Clare Cavanagh I look into her face and see ever more clearly time’s subcutaneous machinations. Death’s terrifying progress. Which will alter nothing in her features, her mouth’s shape, the color of her hair. Nothing, since so little: only this light, this motion, this warmth. Only what isn’t actually there, what can’t be seen,…
It could come right now as a dit-dah of rain, mere pine needle lost in a tree-stack of beads, thorn expelled from red dot, print felt an inch from a finger, pursed lips speaking in tears. It makes you look dotty. Easily amused. It starts like a Spanish ¡—down on your…
There’s a kind of leaving when you arrive even though it’s the place you’ve come from— how love can be alive There, though not for you, and while it’s like none of the first feelings, a recognition of what is passing flashes, itself passing—there were more deaths, but now there’s only one, And what…
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