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  • Auto-Autumn

    Aged prophets, cradled in Crivelli’s gold, on a heat-waved page replicating quattrocento frescos, seem shy above the trees’ periscopes as if the sky were an unfamiliar cathedral, and, should they appear there now, standing between receding clouds, how gilded their halo, what color their gowns and what scripted tablet would they hold to admonish the…

  • Certitude

    (July evenings occur as a name repeated.) Strange benefit of geography. He studied me at mirrors but recalled only photographs and houses leaning seasonal (a deluded shoreline). Ascertain bird or cicada near. Awaken to a darkened background clouded North by noon. Here is a reverse. We take of gales and a landscape of driving rain….

  • Before Long

    In the days that summer when his mother had to work cleaning the cottages in Dáchenko and Kóslan, Anton was being watched by the Shurins. He was twelve and blind, and his mother feared leaving him alone. He spent his mornings working with Oleg Shurin in the tomato patches along the bluff, and in the…

  • Tree Branch Blues

    It happened when I started . singing hope to sleep The sycamore wants inside . scrapes siding and screens afraid of the wind . Thirst wins over wariness at the waterhole all bow . I have seen rainfall in brightest sunlight . but not snowfall under stars . Something listening . at the bottom of…

  • [Girl] [Eyes] [Foreigner]

    A circle of young: vicious. A circle of young: smells like sugar. A circle of young: why such organization?                               Around what? Around how? And into the circle is assimilation. Meaning: The girl with blue eyes is a foreigner. Xenophobic is a fawning. It smells delicious, of lavender and his mother: He slept with her….

  • The Uses of Doubt

    A few years ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing Muriel Spark. I was speaking to her over the phone at her house in Italy, and so, in addition to my great admiration for her and the distance between us in years, there was a substantial geographical distance. Knowing that she hadn’t published her first…

  • Down This Wall of Heat

    The house gathers dust and rushes. (Unreadable.) And the girl’s body arches. See the unbecoming angle. I lie down now. Open-mouthed-bird. And trust they’re all singing. These our only taboos: Her folded notion of water and clear voice. Her hand unwrapped. Climb in closer. Without line these your limbs, gills, wrist a small cut on…

  • [This Is a Picture]

    This is a picture of the unrequited. It wants you to touch it. Its torso exists as a diagonal plane of yellow crumbling into black: a horizon where it turns, cell by cell, into dust. Cropped at the neck, it yet retains a dumb capacity to love. For which it reprimands itself repeatedly. Yesterday it…

  • To Zeno

    You with your equation, an arrow plugs your heart, half in half out makes nowhere at all. You won’t admit it but what’s left is time: a patient sponge to stop your arrow from bleeding. It isn’t more years I want, just some older days. If a day had four hours more I think I…