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           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…

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…

My daughter gives me her treasure, a stone-glass bead. And I give her my treasure — I accept her stone-glass bead.

     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…

The front a mirror. The back a picture of the Garden of Eden. A strange find of the old master of glass.

This lake is not a concept but the home of fishes. Slowly the ducks go by. The Christ is not a concept but one of these ducks. Which one?

    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…

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….

The baseball is also known as the fruit whereby man lost his innocence. No one shouts, “Throw the old peach.” It is the Old Apple and when the air here greens and violets dab purple, while the leaves still keep their pure forms before ravenous generations of insect commence to ravage, the Apple is thrown….