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for Gregory J. Pamel, M.D. Dawn is ugly, a fug over day, a tarpaulin on a top-of-the-line motorcycle. An amaryllis has a hideous nativity: two shoots peer from the bulb frantically as a chick peers out of its ovular jail. Beginnings are rarely pretty: think of sperm, woolly mammoths, pre-atmospheric goo. Beginning, too, is the…

Waiting for their release— for the shoes without laces, the belts kept from suicide —drumming, When will they be released, when and will they ever? The hours so used to their own sequence cannot pass one another. Diamond Ear waits here for his esposa, and inside the held-in selves stare at their feet. They hate…

for René Touzet Is music, then, a balcony from which a shuffling of passings is surmised, or is it mortar and archway, or must it be inkling, maestro, a suspicion of survivals? We sit in rows to watch ourselves listen to your danzas and contradanzas, the Cubanized European genres which define a certain buoyancy in…

I hate the psyche. Cloudy today: brown, carmine, and blue. I’m having a devilish time controlling my body’s two gods: theatric, tutelary. Last night I decided again to be a maniac, risking brain fever, like my father, whose temperature once rose to 108: impressive. In our house, only the sick were great.

French postcard, circa World War I In agreeing to be the crucified woman, she knew she would need to hang there with no pockets, no purse, no pearls. She would know how to stretch into it when the time came. Did she enjoy an innate ballerina who could express befitting grace? While still her bearing…

For his sake drifting away from the true windlessness, torn sails the aftermath of him: white canvas suffering too vaguely from the beautiful agreeing with these arguments, but far away: sought him, found him not, distant from image, archetype, the typical sublime’s encroachments, archaeology of his innocence which is to be destroyed. Shaped, shaping, shapes,…

Cryptic owl on my sill, olive branch in the gold-bowered cope, when I was a child I didn’t know what the word “colleague” meant: darkness? My father had many colleagues; I had none. I told his assistant, twenty-one years ago, “I wonder which I love most, words or music.” I can’t remember her advice, though…

The sun came to in late December. Spring seemed just the thing that flattered into bloom the murdered shrubs along the splintered fence. The awnings sagged with puddles. Roads were streams. Wet leaves in sheets streaked everything with rust. The man who raked his lawn transferred a toad too small to be a toad back…

Custome is the most certain Mistresse of language, as the publicke stampe makes current money. But we must not be too frequent with the mint, every day coyning. —Ben Jonson Into my pocket slips a folded note, creased like labia, cached with private promise. Pea blossoms in broth. And my in petto pleasure in thinking…