Article

Night Music

She sits on the mountain that is her home and the landscapes slide away. One goes down and then up to the monastery. One drops away to a winnowing ring and a farmhouse where a girl and her mother are hanging the laundry. There's a tiny port in the distance where the shore marries the…

Sonnet for a Singer

I felt restored: smokeless stars, clear quiet, a sprinkling of      months. And then—I'd never heard such a sound as my neighbor Shirley loosed, mourning her mother, wailed toward the faith-proof Beyond which kept her dead parent from spring on earth. My friend cried to stars the yelp of an animal. On a tape I made,…

The Black Puppy Story

Here comes the black puppy with his ears and his snappy tail and his wet eyes. You say here comes the black puppy wanting to come in or to be run over or for his daily ration of beatings, kicks to the ribs, a smack in the nose and he whines, thank you, thank you….

Hieroglyphic

June, I don't have to use magic burned into roots of      antelope words to tell you what I mean, when I say I met myself in the      Egyptian Room just a few days before my thirty-sixth birthday. It wasn't      vertigo, though vertigo is common in the bowels of the concrete monster.      Crossing Fifth Avenue was…

Flames

I met Kazmir at Mrs. Malek's. He was a couple years older than I was, though only a grade ahead of me. His blond hair was just growing back from the baldy sour they'd given him after the school nurse found lice, and the deep, white-welted scar commemorating a fall from a second-story window when…

Trinity Street

It stands like a resentment. The mind's city unfolded to a huge, discordant image. Recollection closes in on the ancient buildings, the fractured curbs, and in all the places you might have known, women walk in the opposite direction. Onward to their first novel, the fictional release. I look through a great eye, seeing more…

The Land of Fuck

“Here I was begging the Muse not to get me in troble with the powers that be, not to make me write out all those ‘filthy’ words, all those scandalous, scabrous lines, pointing out in that deaf and dumb language which I employed when dealing with the Voice that soon, like Marco Polo, Cervantes, Bunyan…

Siqueiros: Our Countenance

Like through a telescope Planted in a fresh grave, I see through your nostrils, Darkly, the more distant past. Stubborn your horse skull That knows of the price on its head. Like a plate empty for days We stretch our hands out of the frame. A bloody yoke swims through The egg white of the…