In a time zone all our own, we were a bubble of the past, a cleanser upon the last sentence of history. Lazing through tangled medieval lanes we offered everyone a do-over, a mulligan, and as time flowed backwards to greet us we imagined the world transformed— gashes were healed by knives, seatbelts were remembered,…
Where is it, the semaphore branch or bellwether sounding a trail over hill, dale, parking lot . . . leaves down, birds vanished, only a left-over tic and shiver while overhead roar the test flights, free-fall shadows stippling the defunct garden thick with invasives, those exogamous brides. I ask for bread, someone hands me a…
translated by Rebecca Morris and Pamela Casey A young Tibetan sits in the sand by Zha Ling Lake. He is skinny and about eighteen. The throbbing sun scorches his thick dark hair. The lake is silent before him, a steely blue. The Kunlun Mountains reach up beyond the lake, iced snow coating the tops, peak…
We melt the old thing into the new thing. Tongs, a ladle the size of a man’s head I fill with thoughts of molten steel. Fire below the cauldron, in our cigarettes, in the right hand of the man coming back from the bathroom with his skin mag. He’d tell me, were I to ask,…
Starts in estuary whelm and whirl of rock-skin, sea-swell, the hove called salt. I loved the hero-to-be, his life first arrowed unto me, scudding, spared, still unconscious. No he and she to wash away yet, my inhale planked to his ex—. Plus our everywhere wet…
translated by Clare Cavanagh Late afternoon, light snow. The Musée d’Orsay is on strike, beside it a gray lump huddled on the sidewalk’s edge: a bum curled in a ball (maybe a refugee from some country caught in civil war) still lying on the grate, packed in a quilt, a scrap-heap sleeping bag, the right…
At the bend of the highway just past the beachside melon and papaya stands Past the gated entrance to the Kuilima Hotel on the point where Kubota once loved to fish, The canefields suddenly begin—a soft green ocean of tall grasses And waves of wind rolling through them all the way to the Ko‘olau, a…
The soldiers keep Margaret in view. She carries her tripod, unsteadily, and an extra poncho for a bib. That they have let her come this far might be due to the weather, or possibly the kinds of amusements of which she remains unaware. Still, assume that they watch, tracking her as she stomps along…
translated by Maria Koundoura and the author In its center all is water you were saying that night, if you remember as the fire was dimming the light on the moist fingernails slowly peeling the dry skin from the orange before sinking into its yellow succulence A woman, the boy, fruit in this world…
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