The horse, Susan said, because it is the blankest of slates, or because our success—our genes’ successes—are linked, has been written on extensively by our needs. Dumb giants pawing the ground, father, mother, escape, sexuality glistening and rippling, forelock and fetlock, footloose and fearless, or the pleasures of the fearful—fleeing the sudden gesture, careening through…
A wing’s a bridge made of light and lightness. Such an unattaching, then then, such a humming garden. What is finished is brutal. Pink swallow, brown wings and tail acock on a porcelain vase, can be diving so, only if whole is the greenest color. Return, world. Be a little whether….
The goddess of the hunt is not herself. She is tired having waited, having sniffed around surgically. All her arrows jiggle with nothingness, so she turns herself inside out: her tongue is a tail, her throat a torso, her stomach bundled with eyes and claws. She feels, on her cheek, a new weather. Angels drift…
If you materialize this thing, which is a lamp, which is a cup, as practice. If you light it, if you drink from it. Although the long day is still ahead, you may behave in the dark as you do in the dark. The light won’t find you out, it will make room, it…
Since they left Houston that summer, Hugh and his mother had traveled in a long, slow circuit as far north as Amarillo, then worked their way down through El Paso and San Antonio and Austin, seeing sights Hugh had no desire to see, and in which he doubted his mother had any real interest, either….
Then we want to drown or sing To skip ahead as if lost in the past When I say we I mean everything all at once When I say forever Each of us counts our desires And the desire to gather Fills our hearts We create the simplest words We live alone in absolute silence…
I cannot tell you the whole story because the whole story will not fit in my mouth. I have always had a small mouth, small tongue, tiny lungs. If I were to try to tell the whole story, I might expire. All over you, and you in your best black robes. It’s like trying to…
And now they range beneath wheatfields in unmanned chambers out of range. They point themselves at celestial targets; today they are rediscovering snow. Perhaps they whispered unto you the sickness that cut a breast from your breast; possible. Love’s surgeon had it in for you, he spread you at the chancel and unmasked. Then hauled…
I have one powerful reflection regarding the issue I edited of Ploughshares. A friend, a former student, a poet, an ally in the battle against the Vietnam War, a wiry little Irishman with a great sense of humor, phoned me about that time and asked if I were busy; he was in town and wanted…
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