Article

Conversation

1 He said it would always be what might have been, a city about to happen, a city never completed, one that disappeared with hardly a trace, inside or beneath the outer city, making the outer one— the one in which we spend our waking hours— seem pointless and dull. It would always be a…

The Deer

are tentative. Of course. To be an animal is to watch. Is to think about eating all the time. I watch them be so watchful. My window takes them one by one through trees winter strips down to a few species.                              When I saw the deer, I was beginning to type, not it came…

Dead of the Night

  For once, no flowers. Past midnight, and very quiet along this corridor. The clock on the opposite wall is round, a cartoon clock. Funny, the idea of keeping time, here of all places. Beneath the clock, a square tablet announces in bold what is now the wrong date, April 3.    I could walk…

The Earth

translated from the French by Anne Atik Small crystal globe, Earth’s small globe, Through you I see My lovely glass bowl. We’re all locked up In your hard strict breast But so polished, so glossed Rounded by light. Like this horse running Or a lady who halts Or the flower on her dress A child…

My Poetry Professor’s Ashes

remembering Lem Norrell All those rhetorical contraptions of the metaphysicals prying us loose from the world!                     And those licentious exhortations to squeeze the day! Something about the Anglican burial brought those back, and with them your voice rousing those     metaphors off the page. It’s not like I didn’t get a heads-up, right? But…

But in the Onset Come

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…

Winter Worm, Summer Weed

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…

Modern Prototype

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,…