for my friend Joseph Kahn; born 1950, drowned 1982 Walking the floor after midnight I leaf through your pharmacopoeia or a book on stars. How I love the night. It should always be night, and the living with their TVs, vacuum cleaners and giggling inanities silenced. With here and there a window lit a low…
The glass of water between them did not bar, ban or challenge their fevered conversation. But soon the glass shape disappeared and the water became a serious ocean, a sexy flow and barren. This endless gap, pitch and drowning water sprays up these facts: he was just a boy and she a thriving woman; he…
The Captain becomes moody at sea. He's afraid of water; such bully amounts that prove the seas. . . A glass of water is one thing. A man easily downs it, capturing its menace in his bladder; pissing it away. A few drops of rain do little harm, save to remind of how grief looks…
for Henry Johnson Thereafter, his lecture on graves. Yet these are not graves. His lecture on well-organized hell. But this is neither hell nor organized, even to form discernible shapes. A handout: we reconstruct slowly, roil of body on stacked body. And heads, oddly floating to a surface, caught mid-scream and never like Orpheus. The…
My friend and I compare love-at-first-sights, seeing whose got there truly first because sight did it to them. I say it's only language. Without those words, that same order, no love that magnets onto the lover through just walking into a room and looking. All through our teens, getting ready for eyeball-to- eyeball link-ups, so…
The two books I think I am cooking up are: 1. Thingsomeness. Orthodox verse (villanelles, etc.) plus some less orthodox experiments in sound repetition (e.g., borzoi and for joy, echo and threshold). 2. Brass and Percussion: Pros Songs. Derived somewhat frmo classical Greek (“logaedic”) and Chinese fu models (Pound includes the…
My pale inner left arm pierced, and withdrawn; the sweat-heated pillow flattened under my neck; I lay and fingered my mental parts. A draft stirred the red curtain: a figure at the foot of the bed, observing like a brother. Not much trace of him, before our trouble. . . But I needed nothing there….
Without shadow there is no form. —Laura Gilpin What if Shadow should ever leave you? Then you would have no cover, no completion. Naked, you would have no darkness In which to renew your lost pride. Shadow follows for safe voyages. When Shadow speaks, revelation Echoes from watchful, hidden silence. Shadow is darkness caressing light….
As if some child, unwilling to shut even the figurative heart into pocket or lunch pail had carried it plate-like home in a downpour. It was a passionate migration—no matter its redundant shape and thirty others just as crude. The passage did it good, white lace bleeding, the stock message smudged out of language by…
No products in the cart.