He took off his watch, wound it, undressed. One movement to unfold the blanket. And he remained like that. He had forgotten something. There was something he hadn’t finished. The obstacle: perhaps that red sack on the chair, perhaps the black cap on the trunk. And automatically he turned toward the dark mirror. Inside there:…
Almonds that meet the aroma of horses, and apple orchards in October, oaths sworn in dawn mist, the porgy roaming the ocean floor with one eye open to the sea. I hold you near my elbow, and far away on the mountain you gather the soaked grain that the orphaned Assyrian carries to his mother….
A few humbling things. Outside my real house there’s an actual picket fence, a flowerbox, one shady maple, and a lawn too big to mow. I said I’d never come to this. I said a lot of things. And sulked, tempestuous, as seasons passed, unworthy of fierce attention. My greatest fear: fathers grew fat and…
– But what do you want? – A life. – A life? * * * It's possible to love solitude when you're surrounded by a life-with-others. When there is no life-with-others, ultimate things lose their relative meaning. * * * In folk tales, what we've come to consider the human world, the real real world, is the…
Across an alley, opposite exactly my window: Intensive Care Unit. At night I’ll sit in my dark and stare into its greenly lit lucidity: I can almost read the X-rays hung on the wall — two bad ghost pears, the lungs . . . Plasma bottles glister, beep-machines, a blur of women and men in…
I have seen that moon face rise behind my shoulder in the mirror like a bum floating up from the sidewalk bribing his own disappearance with the reminder that suffering reeks to high heaven. Money’s prayers are always answered. The bums go. Delmore stays behind my shoulder as I shave whispering like a dust pan…
Only Colors The little green car came down the hill with a natural parabolic kind of grace, like a sandwich cookie rolling down a string someone has stretched from an upstairs window to the corner of a garage. Only, who was wading barefoot in a stream as wide as a sidewalk that ran along the…
I thank these Kinsmen of the Shelf — Misreading Dickinson I thought I had discovered there A phrase that said it all: “These Kinsmen of the Self.” We know them, lose them, Discover them again, discover Yet more kinsmen, and the self Survives, growing more fragile And more brutal at the selfsame Time. She knew,…
Thrown swallows, called to the delirious Probate of March, declare the unfinishable Resumed and teeming among the stopped towers, Near the plaque for a boy gunned down At the street’s turning, and they shrill their choice Of the entangling covenant, although Each plummet from the topslide of their arcs Obeys a command also. The call…
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