Jelka’s profile decorates the doorway to my secret architecture. Jelka’s profile chaffs at its own imposture, and the indirection of its stardust infiltrates my polar brain: Welcome to the material world where omens of the after-world are leaked, flowing like a black shirt. Mountains migrate into my head: I was there to witness the vulgar…
In the dawn freshness, when the mists are slowly rising from the great lawns and only a few early delivery trucks move silently down the lanes, when the house is quiet but for sounds of deep breathing behind closed doors and the subdued creak of your footsteps on the stairs, to walk out barefoot on…
(from Jacob van Ruisdael and for John Updike) My topsoil coverlet, dampened by a coast that’s warmed by mediation of the sea, shall be transformed (I’ll paint them) into hills, crags bearing castles, churches, theology for which a million suffering soldiers died. A birch tree (blasted) leans along one border to balance the other (a…
I called her my untamable cupcake, she was a humanoid in jodhpurs, a jigsaw on the stage of the ballet. We met in a tourist cabin near a famous crater. Macaroni in leotards, I noted in my notebook. She could prattle until the floodlights goo-ed her lollipop. A sarcasm, fervent and amplified, that could stop…
In every direction drought breaks this land down to the lapses, the scraps of itself: water recoiling from the riverbank, sparse crops corroding in the fields where a crow’s tailfeathers scratch up the ground’s faintest color — drooping, the trees split . . . I feel as highstrung as a woodharp, its sweet sharp whine…
It’s that vague feeling of panic That sweeps over you Stepping out of the #7 train At dusk, thinking, This isn’t me Crossing a platform with the other Commuters in the sad half-light Of evening, that must be Someone else with a newspaper Rolled tightly under his arm Crossing the stiff, iron tracks Behind the…
(from a novel in progress) Everything has had youth. The two old dogs were lifted into their baskets lined with old wadded rags. If the old dogs were set down wrong, if their legs were folded too severely underneath them, the legs would fall asleep before the dogs would sleep, and in the morning the…
I saw a man in the neighborhood, the neighborhood of my life. Walking, a charming smile — grey jacket, and thought, Do I know that face? It was the old gray jacket I liked, its careless retrograde chic. By little things, our fancy moves. I took a few walks with him. And all fall, yellow…
— for my father I want to do this right, as though there were a right way of walking or sitting still, of staring at stoplights changing or the wincing new moon which, after all, doesn’t care what metaphors we make of it — even a right way to smoke, to hold a cup. I…
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