Once words stunned the field, like sudden rain, as if Rain were the name of a woman, whose eyes drenched yours alive in the full torrent of saying exactly what she wanted to say. Then husbandry took over: the dry stare of a dry bush, piling one odd rock on top of another odd rock…
* I first read some poems of Bill Knott's in magazines nearly 10 years ago, in the Fall of 1967. I was a sophomore in college. I remember being stunned by the passion and mystery of the poems. At that time I'd only been reading contemporary poetry with any direction for a year or so…
Not a line, not a glimpse, not a second. Every eye no more inhabited than a fish. The fat on the old woman’s arm hangs like a white sloth from the limb of a tree as she airs her dentures in a tenement yawn. Eyeless, we raise our hands in greeting and touch against the…
We have learned a Mandarin language, an ingrown puzzle binding us to talk to one another— the many ones and others—to disengage with unfixing clarity our actual selves as figures from their grounds, the sheets of glass or broad leaves that hold rain like beads of sweat on a high arched, double arched, romanesque brow…
Our eyes unlash slowly one by one at last bald lids rise What for Mimicry re the poet’s eye looking inwards sees without the lashes’ soft-pleaded intercedence too pupilly cool cruel as muttered justice I call my goodbyes home in the dusk
Coffee keeps me dancing. My father drinks coffee all day, so do I— two of us troubling our hearts with a hundred miles between us. He’s a clerk in a hardware store: paint and machinery all day, TV and historical novels all night as suburban stars fall. May brings reruns, a cold, new appetites. My…
A year before I found what was new: a stream sizzled over stones, August heat rattled the ocean’s brittle edge like a loose pane, a field where weeds like needles poked the wool of thick air. Usually eyes say no to thorns and stick to roses. Today even you saw that ponds brim with sky…
1 Like a transparent tooth In a myth’s mouth I sang of words in words That had no foretell 2 I was the closest relative To the one who never existed That absent autumn drops Its cease-colored nets on oh 3 Ever-so-longing I lay Spanking my placenta plate In curtseyland I’ll stand now Groundswell gate…
A barn owl for an m’s a funny way to run an alphabet tho The merciless talons’ grid over a foot square A white whoosh a juju all eyes & feathers & bless your magnanimity, Kenneth, your immortal artifacts, wine and bread
No products in the cart.