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I came across this word unexpectedly. It means fatty, greasy, unctuous—I can’t say exactly since I’ve not seen it before. That’s the beauty of language—such surprise and variation, each synonym a slightly different meaning. I think of unctuous as a wormy, mealy-mouthed flatterer; greasy, a male: disingenuous, pomaded, cigarette dangling from mouth. It’s in these…

There’s a stealthy, sort of leopard- like knocking at my door tonight I half wish were you, but the sky’s grainy violet and no one’s out there loitering darkly like a dent. Know what’s going down? Total eclipse of the moon, Kid—it’s pretty dim out, just the gas station’s block of light like the landmark…

In the painting the twelve hats look pretty much alike. Tricorns, they’re called, and when studying them in their invisible grid, one inevitably thinks of his face. An allegory about Napoleon: The parts of his face had always hated each other. Like wild stars in a burning sky, many-a-time they came dangerously close to colliding….

In such darkness you’re not listening: bees, corn, and tumescence take up space, silence the landscape. The hour of your seeming quiet soon passes, plowed under. If I trouble your sinking so much you see the bottom and the matching silences of moth, money, and the worm, am I a prophet, or is it foretold,…

for Tim Wakefield On the mound you stand—just so— exhale—so—throw at the same spot over and over. There’s only one way to toss a knuckleball, near-impossibly simple; your fingernails flick it at the distant lozenge of the catcher’s mitt, but it must be thrown so evenly the ball won’t spin at all, sixty feet six…

There are men like these, who stand above the loft and gloss of downtown rhetoric, who hold for us a quiet surplus, and think— not of present need and use—but, of what is necessary in dire times. There are those who go unnoticed, apart from the general chat, who have in mind the words we…

—translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak We are children of our era, the era is political. All affairs, day and night, yours, ours, theirs, are political affairs. Like it or not, your genes have a political past, your skin a political cast, your eyes a political aspect. What you say, has a resonance, what…

I went into a bar and ordered a childhood dream. A woman came in and sat down next to me. She was rather lanky for an amputee. A voice said She’s too shallow to dive into. You’ll break your noose on her concrete psyche. I didn’t listen. As a way of shattering the ice, I…