Poetry

¡Si muero,
dejad el balcón abierto!                                           —Lorca The hut in the snow; the pinewoods;                                                                 I was always coming…

Night at the edge of the world, where nothing sings, except this mop-girl in her stonewashed coveralls, the silted airport gloom filming her hands like some ersatz account of sainthood. A prayer from her mother’s book, or a slum-town dance tune disappears into the pleats of fabric, when she bends into her work, unnoticed, which…

Think back with a shovel, bend, do that. Who’s breathing through these tubes now? So this is how you plant trees in Scotland all afternoon. We take instruction. The translucence of it. Each plastic cylinder the exact shade of a stem tall and suddenly wide, slipped over sapling after sapling sunk into earth, tied, staked…

from The Poem Under the Ground Having opened the manhole over the swalletHaving dammed up the streamWhat is this odd sensation?Why do I feel more invisibleMere memory as I dip under the stone?How do I blind my way in and touchBridge my way down with knees on one sideIsn’t this oddHeels pressing the vertical darkAnd…

The right words formed in my mind backlit by the hum of their origin yet even as they brightened into line I fell asleep inside them too tired to begin. If accident has design, then here it is— the gaps unfilled, no artifice. Is the door into the oak hard to find? No. It’s where…

After an hour it was clear there was nothing to say we didn’t both already know that couldn’t be said better in the act of lifting a fork of fish eggs to my mouth which is how we continued the exchange; a piece of rustic bread torn in two for your sea bass, a sip…

Breaking my fast with earth and stones, or worse, eating the masonry of old churches, the boulders of floods, you reminded me of my new copy of Études néantes I killed a fly with twenty-two years ago, how the nail in the wooden beam of my bedroom entered through the back cover, the index, the…

Remembering I hadn’t finished Cocteau’s L’Ange Heurtebise while on the edge of sleep and that the reason for this was down to how the living word lifting off the page transmigrates into wings of watered silk with which we reach into our dreams to carry on the fine conversation we’ve been having about one thing…

for Shin, born in Camp 14, North Korea The smallness of men’s souls sickened you,especially your own.Yesterday, and all the yesterdays before that yesterday, executions at dawn.White hoods hid the heads.Ropes lashed the arms, piss wet the pants. You wondered how quickly the first one diedwhile the other clung to lifefor what seemed forever, thrashing…