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The Funeral

We went down to the ocean, wearing the silk hats we wore to the funeral. It was like a party, people drank too much. No one mentioned the dead child. Someone said that the idea for escalators came from the waves. A woman interpreted dreams: a window stood for fear, a wheatfield, fate. I lay…

Strictly Bucolic

Are these mellifluous sheep, And these the meadows made twice-melliferous by their      bleating? Is that the famous mechanical wind-up shepherd Who comes with instructions and service manual? This must be the regulation white fleece Bleached and starched, And we could be posing for our first communion pictures, Except for the nasty horns. I am beginning…

Outside the Führerbunker

Let us those who have obliterated so many faces deny their own faces let us grant them no faces let us blot out their faces the sun eats the snow                        let time devour their faces let us look for the faces of those they killed who died faceless in the name of…

Eurydice

It bears no correlation to the living world. It is as if a malice toward all things malleable, mutable, had seized the universe and emptied its spherical alleys. How could you think it, that I would choose to stay, or break under the journey back? Like a dog I had followed your unravelling skein of…

Sophistications

SWEETIES Once when I was very bad and bit several of the Debrosses girls in the afternoon, Madame Debrosse hung a notice round my neck that said, "Watch out, Sophie bites." She told Maman I should be made to wear white gloves like her girls; it is so they will not touch anything dirty in…

A Marriage Poem

1. Morning: the caged baby sustains his fragile sleep. The house is a husk against weather. Nothing stirs — inside, outside. With the leaves fallen, the tree makes a web on the window and through it the world lacks color or texture, like stones in the pasture seen from this distance. This is what is…

Mykonos. Wall With Mailbox

The tacky dromedaries of the tachydromeion, Swaying in place, are yellow and are blue. They browse upon my postcards. The Aegean Gallops in all directions all around them. They are true Stoics. They can go nowhere. And they do. The light grows positively Sophoclean. Towerings and dishevelments ensue. A slash of zacharoplasteion neon Scribbles a…