What it was like to sit with Mr. Fox on the Blvd. Raspail and negotiate my post at Morlais, then Toulouse, then come back in a riveted trunk with Henry Millers sewn into my lining, Frank Sinatra to greet me in the mile square city, Dutch ships everywhere my father and mother in from Pittsburgh…
Mon petit chou, no more great vows are said. Can’t save, extinguish, master, or attain— My gusto blown to bits. The carpenter shaves a door, below his breath Sings I got daisies in green pastures, I got my girl, who could ask for anything more? The gutters overflow and eat concrete. From upper decks,…
Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact, but maybe everything that dies someday comes back. —Bruce Springsteen The bitter glue of snow makes the seven-hour trip take twelve. I’m crying—have been sobbing off and on for more than two days. I’m a pitiful, middle-aged mess. Goggles is in the trunk in a Hefty Bag and…
Stone turns to buttermilk, pipe- cleaners to dreams, necromancers and pythons to aristocrats and ballerinas. Here Platinum shrinks lung cancer. Taxol, from tree bark, withers an ovarian metastasis into nothingness and Prednisone, cures lymphoma. What is this, then, if not alchemy, potions and witch’s brews, toxins turned to gold, barbed wire into silvery South Sea…
for Jeff Male (1946–2003) When I cough, people duck away, afraid of the coal miner’s disease, the imagined eruption of blood down the chin. In the emergency room the doctor gestures at the X-ray where the lung crumples like a tossed poem. You heard me cough, slipped off your coat and draped it with…
In her book, she said the guiding principle was guarding against irreparable losses; she’d managed to live so as to avoid any major cause of regret. Anyone who’s done that, raise your hand: you’re excused from this poem. As for us who remain, let’s go around the circle and list our regrets. For the stuporous,…
I shimmied my way up the thick vine like a cord plugged into heaven—electricity crackled down the line between my hands, reflexes tightening the fingers—I took it as a message from the gods, onwards! So up I went clapping hands ankles knees to the breeze as the cord arced left and right in the sky—…
I. The garden of Eden. Also called earthly p., to distinguish it from the heavenly p. First She is seventeen, he twenty-one. She is a green girl, Ophelic but believing Herself a witch-queen, while he plays Edmund, Bastard and natural. Sitting on the cliff’s edge, her Back to the village where floats down…
On the stage Robert Schumann is getting drunk With tempestuous love. You remember what it is to listen to passionate Nineteenth-century music, a clamor of argument and struggle Invoking the old gods, thunderbolt and hurricane, At the moment of their dying, and here in the lightning Is Clara whose father forbids her to marry…
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