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…
The bell in you out of which I was rung long ago removed, I cannot go home. What did they do with your uterus? I think of it as a hat or a bird, resting on a head or flying away, over those mountains, on the other side of which I have never been. Maybe…
Federal holding cell, Hughes County jail Fights. Never quiet—like years back with the folks, but ratcheted-up, bloodied, multiplied, till the badge writes the last two shovers up, says he’ll do the same for all of us if we can’t keep the crybabies smothered I WANT SOME PEACE, SLEEP, NO MORE GETTING OUT OF THE CHAIR,…
Sometimes in the fading winter light that streaks my desk by six o’clock revealing grains in aging oak, like desert sands, I imagine, before leaving my shelved books to laze with those I love before the easy flicker of some talk show on TV, that I stay back this time, …
translated by Lyn Coffin, with Leda Pugh Oh, pain will die, I swear, when I succeed in making a Myshkin of these tears to master agony, quietly, there where I burn with beautiful helpless need, where voices go mute, and feelings wake late, before finally disbanding. To smile (to reach understanding) just as He said….
Good-looking husky guy six-foot-four in late twenties or early thirties, Caucasian male, as the initial police report will note, he’s solid-built as a fire hydrant, carries himself like an athlete, or an ex-athlete just perceptibly thickening at the waist, otherwise in terrific condition like a bronze figure in motion, sinewy arms pumping as he…
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