This fog over the body and mind, this sleeping too long on the grill of the mattress while morning pours in. . . . It’s ten below. The sun is shining but it’s too cold to go out. The children, true, are bundled up, drive their snowmobiles over the ice with a swishing sound, a…
(Ormos Athinios, Thira) Morning comes, and the baked look of rising early on people’s faces; or evening, and the cool with a trace of rot in it lifts off the face of the waves. And in the concrete cafe, the simple blank shoulders of fascination, changed in no year; with emptiness in their mouths —…
My handwriting’s big, like grazing cattle, I’m learning cursive on the dock The summer that polio twists my mother’s legs. I write as she reads me the fable Of the prince who was sleepless for 100 years. There’s always a broken heart And I know sleepless nights are already a spell. White gauze, the curtains…
That plastic Buddha jars out a Karate screech Before the soft words with their spores The cosmetic breath of the gravestone Death invented the phone it looks like the altar of death Do not worship the telephone It drags its worshippers into actual graves With a variety of devices, through a variety of disguised voices…
Sweeney Astray is a version of the Middle Irish tale, Buile Shuibhne, in which Sweeney, king of a small kingdom in north east Ulster, is cursed by a saint and transformed into a bird at the Battle of Moira. The bulk of the story is concerned with his subse quent life of frightened wandering and…
It is not true what they say about the body: that it must be loved, that it cannot sleep through its nights alone without injury. Look at me. Look at the way the artist lies about his loneliness, painting a room where walls, floor, and ceiling converge on a door too small for me to…
Stop looking like a purse. How could a purse squeeze under the rickety door and sit, full of satisfaction, in a man’s house? You clamber towards me on your four corners— right hand, left foot, left hand, right foot. I love you for being a toad, for crawling like a Japanese wrestler and for not…
Translations is set in a hedge-school, a kind of ad hoc classical academy, in an Irish-speaking community in County Donegal. It is late August 1833, and at this time the British Army is conducting the first Ordnance Survey of Ireland. The two short extracts that follow are from the first half of Act Two. Lieutenant…
I do not believe the ancients— the constellations look like nothing at all. See how their light scatters itself across the sky, not bright enough to guide us anywhere? And the avenue of trees, leaking their dark inks, are shapes I can’t identify. The night is too inconstant, a constant injury, alchemical moonlight changing my…
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