On Slaughter Beach I lay me down on the sand between surf and calliope, there where oceania meets glitz: plastic mosques and minarets and transvestals, sub- verts, countersexuals—Spanky Sparklenuts, Afterbirth Boy and Crab Apple, Candace the Grimace and She-Who-Eats-Only-Fish. Nighttime it was, brine-sour, my head sunk in shadow. Above, boardwalkers walked—catcalls and titters. Such was…
“I will smash their guitar.” —Joan Miró The force that drives the left-handed guitarist Waking from a dream that again escapes me to play right-handed . . . immortality, frets like the eyes of vermin. No sheep fold, no birth chords and stops, scorings, the music itself lava, breasts, no color…
Sometimes I have to squint to see clear and used to think this a fault of light— God’s failure to beam the intended world bright enough on the brain pan. Now I know it’s age, my own worn optical works that blur leaves to smudge. Justice wears a blindfold, and the firing squad captive…
My good friend who these days despises the newspapers Complains this isn’t news but gossip, a talking down, In brief sidebars, in the mathematics of The intellect, from the highest To the lowest common denominator, The front pages with their treaties signed and breached In an afternoon, the borders Fixing and unfixing themselves Like…
Spring rain. Inklings, earthlings, wet present The sequence of events, that’s what’s best, when the clots participles and shivers before red sun and cicadas dissolve as from the drugs . . . or in your city, Santoria, snow cones, dubbed syllables to hear the names, to have the characters cast down The…
My father, an American, was singing in dialect over the grave of my great-grandmother. The sun was setting. The country was in another war. My mother was planting nasturtiums over Nonna’s grave. Her green skirt was shorter than the grass. A northern shrike was piercing a songbird on a thorn of barbed wire. The old…
We don’t want to be shown, in photographs sent home, What the poet saw that summer, that evening In the mountains with the shepherds, that unspoiled Landscape with its caves and weathered ruins, Nor to be retold, in long scribbled letters After the wine was drunk, drunken revelations Of the shepherds’ joys and troubles, no…
“Thy absence overflows the rose” —Hart Crane Because from the humid bed of August the afternoon held its blue arm out to me, I stood on a hill in Garretsville, Ohio at the headstone for Hart Crane— one shared by Clarence Crane, his father. As clouds removed all color from the sky, their shadows clarified…
Newlyweds, up at the Del Mar station, saw the woman stumble & fall, & ran back to pull her to safety, the train bearing down. For a thousand feet north of the point of impact, investigators found parts of a briefcase, sketches of gowns, a low-heeled black shoe. From the White House, the President screaming…
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