There’s more to it than spilling our red garbage can into the city’s big blue bin. I have to slip from bed without waking my wife. (I pretend I’m a silk handkerchief, the bed’s a pocket; then I pick myself.) I sneak past my children’s bedrooms, where they lie submerged in sleep. Easing shut the…
In my little museum of erotica I would place your feet. I would place your feet sandwiching my feet. Their softness. Their heat. And I would place your arms as you do mornings, beneath my neck. around my waist, tugging me towards you, my back to your chest. This well-beingness I would set on a…
Where any of us is going in tomorrow’s reckless Lexus is the elemental mystery: despite instructions he left behind, Houdin- i, who could outwit ropes and chains, padlocks and steam- er trunks, could extricate himself from underwater metal crates, could send forth, he was certain, a message from the other side, never cracked the curtain…
Some plucked from flight by sweep of net or grasp of hand, immediately darken and flicker out. A drift of stars becomes mere green beetles scraping the glass bottom of a jar. Other kinds go on flashing, ardent no matter how captive they are, lighting up even the smallest heaven. And still others make a…
Well we did our best in deracinated weather. Daughters were wedding daughters, suddenly. They’d registered at Bed Bath & Beyond. Rain-hurled catalpa flowers bruised the yard. The dual-mothered bride procured a dress, to her surprise. Pert cannabis jungled up. One wandered under oaks, umbrella’d to the hilt, like some female in a lyric or a…
A girth for pack or saddle; a tight grip; a thing done with ease; a certainty to happen. —Webster’s for cinch Two years had slipped by since Cinch moved into the interior to be closer to the projects where he did most of his work, but mostly Cinch was here because this was where he…
for Robert Philen I saw all these things the moment contained (what the light proposed), a camellia bush in thick red bloom all January, some flowers browning on the dormant lawn (still green): they smelled like something afternoon; wax baskets of evergreen mistletoe hung from bare limbs of a southern red oak, verdant parasite on…
It’s really cold in here now, easily forty below something, and half the class is asleep. Snow dazzles in the windows, makes a cake of each desk. It’s really cold in here now. I’ve been lecturing on the same poem for twenty-six hours and half the class is asleep. I want them to get it….
translated by José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes No matter how much he pondered the Virgin’s pregnancy, how much his thoughts went back and forth, his heart and troubled soul couldn’t figure it out. —traditional Filipino verse narrative of the life and death of Christ Chisel, plane, and hammer, to you I’ll whisper my bitter…
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