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A pupa of pain, I sat and lay one July, companioned by the bird the Indians called “four hundred tongues.” Through the dark in the backyard by my bed, through the long day near my front couch, the bird sang without pause an amplified song “two-thirds his own,” books told me, “and one-third mimicry.” Gray…

At the crowded Ganges once I hitched a ride with tour-group tourists in their bus— They'd let me join them for that trip to the airport through seven miles of city, more of countryside. The members of that group wore wide-brimmed straws, sipped Cokes they'd brought along, showed each other trinkets they had bargained for,…

He holds a slender cappucino cup As still as anything I see or feel. He licks the chilled lime soup line from his lips. I lie about my name and where I'm from; I'd never tell him anything I've done. Without talking, he seems a dream of want. I look for splinters in the picket…

(sonnet from the German of Georg Heym, 1911, freely translated with apologies for the anachronism of using the modern world ‘gulag’ in line four; its purpose is to suggest certain modern analogies with this pre-1914 poem of tsarist Russia, even in such very specific details as the slave labor camps “beyond Verkhoyansk”; today the “abominated”…

I love the gold haloes of the saints in Giotto's frescoes of the legend of St. Francis. I love the plainness of the story, plain as the Saint's brown habit. In the Basilica at Assisi, lying on my back with my binoculars, my feet on my guidebook, I trace the tale in fragments. He is…

Somewhere, maybe in the spirit, effort is trying to remain lost and unnoticed when truly it is the substantial: carrier of bells and evenings, light crisp and unnecessary hugging a wall. A black wall which children shriek at and hit with sticks—no point but much effort. A man stands up, his house is a desk….

One of the laws the pseudo-commissioner decreed: We were to plug our memory sockets Into the damaged main-frame he kept locked In his dungeon. With the flick of his switch, Worlds began to crumble. Or so we thought. And in these quasi-desperate straits Only one person could save us. He'd need A pack of radar…

I wish we were our furthest father’s father. A clump of slime within a warming swamp. Living and dying, fertilizing, bearing,      We’d ooze our essence, numb and damp. A sprout of algae or a sandy hillock, Formed by the winds and heavy with earth’s clutch. Then quits; even a pond-bug’s head, a gull’s wing      Would…

drifts near the ceiling above every head, one Ma per son, daughter, and grandchild. You have a yellow Ma, Mother, like a lightbulb in a cloud. She's looking at you with a kind smile. She's taking it and taking it. With every Ma there is a Pa to dish it out. You have a yellow…