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…
Thomas Lux is always getting ready to leave for somewhere else: for the highway to his home in Waltham, Massachusetts, where he spends part of each week with his eleven-year-old daughter, Claudia; to his classes at Sarah Lawrence College, “each week a honk for Wallace Stevens” when passing through Hartford; to a writing residency at…
—a translation of Dante Alighieri’s Purgatorio, Canto XVII Remember, reader, if ever high in the mountains the fog caught you, so you could see only as moles do, looking through their skin how when the humid, dense vapors begin to grow thinner the sphere of the sun finds its way feebly…
When I was younger I loved until I disappeared. I rested my head in my hand and saw only the beloved: his unruly words, the chocolate of his eyes, each hair on his head a vine from the soul. If we were sitting at a table— the other people around us, the table itself, the…
No products in the cart.