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  • Those Corridors

               translated by the author and Robert Pinsky I walk those corridors by torchlight Hearing water trickle down onto broken slabs. Deep into the mountain. In niches, busts of my friends, Their eyes are of marble. Only the light and shadow Throw over their faces a brief sour grimace of life. So, further into the…

  • Jazz From Another Life

    Yes, we all have those spots of time, as Wordsworth said, when we see the deeper reality that’s always waiting. For example, I stood beside a red Volkswagen in the rain feeling the wind on my face, as wind is frequently      a conductor of various profound intimations, I saw evergreen trees reflected in the rear…

  • On The Eating of Mice

         A woman prepared a mouse for her husband’s dinner, roasting it with a blueberry in its mouth.     At table he uses a dentist’s pick and a surgeon’s scalpel, bending over the tiny roastling with a jeweler’s loupe . . .      Twenty years of this: curried mouse, garlic and butter mouse, mouse sauteed in its…

  • Elephant Dormitory

        An elephant went to bed and pulled a crazy quilt up under its tusks.     But just as the great gray head began filling with the gray wrinkles of sleep it was awakened by the thud of its tail falling out of bed.     Would you get my tail? said the elephant to another…

  • Harvest Time

    These calm days of September with their sun. It’s time to harvest. There are still clumps of cranberries in the woods, reddening rosehips by the stone walls, hazel nuts coming loose, and clusters of black berries shine in the bushes, thrushes look around for the last currants and wasps fasten on to the sweetening plums….