They were naked and the earth Was covered with light snow. They squatted and said nothing. The children appeared asleep. It got dark and they were still there: On a vast plain without landmarks, Under a sky the color of slate and lead, On an evening in late December. I’m told, but do not believe,…
1. Ulysses to Calypso I think I’m looking for Ithaca, not myself. My heart, brain, ivory bones below the surface might be pearls to serious girlfriends, but I consider myself an onion, not an oyster. You might get wise by staring at your face in the water, listening to Sirens, asking the dead in hell…
You make yourself new again. Along your sides, only a thin line marks the scar where you lay open one whole summer. Steam rises from your body in this heat. You move slowly you sit up to your chin in yourself. One morning you are a blue floor. You are rising, you are learning to…
In Ohio I ran into a red barn floating. I taped it. I put it back. It kept swinging open. It kept falling apart. In New York I wove concrete into my gaggle of veins. I stopped the flute of my ears with thick bungs. In New Hampshire winds entered my ear. I became a…
Phipp’s wife, Bettina Feather Phipps, was convalescent on a blue-striped chaise from the impositions of her daily life: “And cook, who should be legally barred from cooking for others, preparing my lunch of native asparagus on triangles of toast— the slight relief in my semi-invalid’s regime— curdled the bechamel and burnt the toast, and served…
Put it this way, lovey, some people stab themselves with their own strength: stubbornly clinging, when all the best of collective wisdom, not just your parents, but your friends, too—calls up the feral outline of a lover that love for yourself should let you let go. Thinking about it, I had it all so clear…
If I look to the stars for answers it seems the stars have troubles of their own. Each night finds them regrouped into new constellations that leave me worse than before: dumbfounded, perplexed. I knew how to read once the flight of crows; a pig’s gut had, on occasion, given valuable information and the bleached…
After the month in Sicily, the ocean’s edge unravelling around our own volcanic knees; after the dark plums that throbbed like fairy tale hearts in the woodsman’s basket; the voyage in another’s arms where we were innocent as tourists visiting familiar landscapes for the first time we come back to our old lives as to…
map-makers of old used to call the “terra incognita” blanks “sleeping beauties” The first hundred years passed quickly. She slept, or pretended to sleep, until no one burst into her chamber to cry “Your Majesty, the New World, a conspiracy of cartographers . . . oh” There was a land between sleeping and waking where…
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