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I keep going to my own funeral with a spade to help the gravedigger and a transistor radio playing pop and rock to put on the side of the grave because I might get down among the dead and I am afraid of the bones. What if they should get up and squeak No room…

After Verlaine In the endless anxieties of the plain the uncertain snow shines as sand. Of copper is the sky, without one light. One would believe any moon, seen living and dying. As some storm clouds hover infirm and grey, the oaks of close-lying forests are among the vapours. Of copper is the sky, without…

We trace ourselves in order to omit the tracery tense unfolding a flesh offering a limit We travel the ellipse of ourselves each inhabited One inside the other limitless warm surface & not wanting knowing the limit tracing the arrival We come together One orb One & One We fold together unfolding rhythm of our…

Beneath this city, lies a city, nine stone repetitions of the Rise and Fall in vertical complexity. One wall, its roots in layer one, depicts the line of ancestries. Nine masons hewed a vine of stone which bloomed nine times. Each blooming, small in minutes, is repeated, and appalling centuries of stone leave us their…

This dread disease was first recorded by An ancient commentator, who described The symptoms well but possibly relied Too much on hearsay. Be that as it may, It starts with fever followed by a chill, Then six full days of agony near death, Rapidity of pulse, shortness of breath, And diarrhea, though they have a…

Much earlier I rose, committed myself to waiting for the mailman the milkman the ghost of the man at the open skylight the sky blue, gray a certain visitor at the door making unreasonable demands Get up eat breakfast at dawn the windows stay closed today Dark blue till afternoon Someone comes anyway, a friend…

A frog thuds for attention, a scream jammed in its gullet. The night spins a dream of sparks from her pillow, lifting her till her toes drop from the hammock where she’s nodded from the sun all day under a maple full of ladybugs and hornets. Now she tips from repose and spits sleep into…

The wind is west, the season, fall, The time is now but also then, And some men wait while other men Watch fiercely westward, watching all And seeing nothing, nothing but The things of which they have been told. The sun is weak, the wind is cold, And something – they do not know what…

In the country perhaps some rooster or another crows on Monday morning (the 15th? the 22nd?) This particular sound reminds me that I haven’t changed my pants since Monday Between the rising and the setting of the sun I’ve forgotten my old friends. translated by George Kimball