for Dawn Chin, a student from Korea You're barely twenty. Your last essay for me begins: “Until I realized the value of life, I sure went through a lot of anguish of the heart.” All our Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays together, I put in of and the and couldn't explain why we say, “I tried to…
June 4, 1977 A falling star, or worse, a planet (true or bogus) may thrill your idle eye with its quick hocus-pocus. Look, look then at that locus which doesn't deserve sharp focus. * * * There frowning forests stand decked out in rags and tatters. Departing from point ‘A,’ a train there bravely scatters its…
In a dirt village near Sierra Plata, men who are their own shadows, their own wives, drive flatbeds to the taverns; sweat-stained, with gold dust stuffed in little sacks that dangle along the hard edges, the steel curves of their bodies. Tense as switchblades, they wait for the finger-touch of a woman, a thief, or…
Dipping our shoulders under with each lunge we twelve far-pregnant women stride the shallow children's pool stretching our bulbous bodies out. Blue pool. White light. Late afternoon: the beams surge low and full. “The sun is god.” A dozen heads rock: shrugs pushing the shimmer of round into flat. Each color tends to color the…
Please don't take the cemeteries. We can't sleep when the dead fidget in air, their frantic fingers hushing the wind. We'll give bread, or pastures, even the trees tucked into themselves like frightened children. But please don't take the cemeteries. For each stone there is a blossom, a tear, an empty room where someone waits…
All night I search the dead for inspiration. Outside, the lawns have turned to wilderness. Plows turning the snow. Gusts of wind dissolve in a tangle of elms. Ice forms on the new roof. Weakens it. Too much trying has finally ended. No one seems ever to come or to go. Only the taillights of…
Who in his right mind would hold the brothers to blame? They lived in their own mental torment, unrelieved by day or their own lies. The sun dropped like a stone one night and the brothers talked on. The past, the son, the younger people in their life. The garden. The heart can approach the…
What in the sour wind Made the voices come again And the trees begin To move in? Spoken to And spoken for, You were waited upon And waiting. The leaves woke On the windcombed branches, And the footed trunks Not in twos advanced But like a lightless fire From the hill descended. * * * You…
(for my father) What the world spoke today was not the world but what I thought of it. Six days of rain. Through my blurred slice of window I saw a fragment of what there is to see. How small I am. How large to notice that space among spaces. And shortening my vision I…
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