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Sally, I was happy with you. Yet a dirty cafeteria in a railway station — In the hour before dawn over a formica table Confetti’ed with cigarette ash and coffee stains — Was all we ever knew of a home together. “Give me a child and let me go”: “Give me a child and let…

Snow melting when I left you, and I took This fragile jaw we’d found in melting snow Two springs before I left, beside a brook Where raccoons washed their hands. And this, I know, Is that raccoon we’d watched for every day. Though at the time her wild human hand Had gestured inexplicably, I say…

Snaps its twig-tether — mounts — Free Dream-yanked up into vacuum Wings snickering. Another, in a shatter, hurls dodging away up. They career through tree-mazes Nearly uncontrollable love-weights. And now Temple-dancers, possessed, and steered By solemn powers Through insane stately convulsions. Porpoises Of dove-lust and blood-splendour With arcs And plungings, and spray-slow explosions. Now violently…

Grandmother is all bleak and bare While the alien whom I do not know Fattens golden on the cliffedge. Yet although our bones rot more rotten than we know Or than we care to know; Although we find God’s throne but not God; And although we are all in our blueblack way Bleaker and barer…

for L. I can almost see the prairie where you are— the flowering grasses and the cones of white blossoms on the horse chestnut trees. The horizon calms you after months of cities. I imagine your eyes seek that line as if you had cast it out over water. A few nights ago, I saw…

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…