after John Clare All dark, and my feet against the feed-room floor scuff cement, find their way to the light, the switch, which flares on with a snap of bird- wings’ nimble shuffle and flight, the rafters blowing off feathers, then my hands against the grain bin’s…
Andrew Byar began his experiment in the garden, going out in the dusky evenings after the help had dispersed for the day, after the cook had served the last meal and washed the china and departed to catch the final trolley, after the gardener had arranged the tools in a gleaming, orderly progression against the…
On the shore, the moon breaks on the rocks, gathering and shattering itself. The man admits surprise, how easily the point enters the heart. You have only the one day, it’s a birthday. You can smile, I am, he did. He buried iron pots and the cast-iron pan, he washed them, covered their surfaces…
no there is nothing today I want to read I want to gather you like the sky at sixteen I was a real beauty nudged to excellent ways of comforting I was told Radha he grows weak your silhouette and eyes the sculpture Tikkuman chisels forever too busy to take a wife and Radha they…
someone keeps snipping our frayed bottoms off and sticking our necks in cold water. Tonight, nothing revives us. Everything is Hail Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth. I am sick to death of their lot. O tragedy, o fringy queen, that old scene. What do they do with the stars at night? Pluck them out as like…
after Pavese October: gravity and annulling wind pinioning the limbs of the fruit trees, the glinty olives; the cannon-gray dawn auguring a long, lax day of rain— Where once a young god breathed, whose footsteps astonished the earth, whom Viking sadness touched hardly at all, like a cloud’s frail shadow, now, at the windowsill, a…
for Gertrude Stein O gloves of Sweden, you with the suede verbs, whoever yearns for you has more than earned her heap of earth and its kern and slur of notes. How much space should we leave between words? Enough for Elijah to come in or for love to let itself out? Let it be…
Its deep green lancelets open as psalms above the knotted, black stems; a promise of bud in two years’ time frozen hard in the cells like the possibility of migraine or sickle cell in blood, the low hum of obesity turned to tuber-shaped, scaled appearances; a pink, soft frost or gilding; padmokasa bulbed out of…
Not the ratcheting crescendo of Ravel’s bright winds but an older, crueler passion: a woman with hips who knows when to move them, who holds nothing back but the hurt she takes with her as she dips, grinds, then rises sweetly into his arms again. Not delicate. Not tame. Bessie Smith in a dream of…
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