when the sun un-sets, and vanilla wakefulness is stillsomewhat subservient to sleep’s dirty kingdom? Well there I was, inside some sixteenth-century Paduaand I watched agog as pretty maids in period underclothes scamperedlaughing down a palace’s back stairs; and on those stairs, wedged pressed against a wallbetween the ceiling and the floor, there stood but one…
that once cool and heavy egg that wouldone day have hatched a clever goose of gold. I cooked it in a pan until it smelted from a hardinto a runny yolk, and then I promptly drank the molten yellow,gulped it down and felt it start to burn away my tongue and gums and teeth whose…
The deer has the eyes of a deer in headlights.I must have them too, sitting in the car, driving.The deer came out of nowhere. It is magic.It’s the kind of magic you wish wouldn’t happen.The deer must be thinking the same about me.The road came out of nowhere, this man and his car.How do these…
as though the ocean swept it away like a sand dune.If I pretend there was no restaurant then I neversaw your glossy eyes, where the old manwho’d sit at the counter each daysaid I can tell he’s a pervert. Just look at his eyes.But if there was no restaurant then there was no old manand…
It was as if I were trying to climb into its eyesor mouth, the animal that inhabited me,as if I could take myself by surprise and thereby rid myself of the thing that bothered me.My zoo was open. It was supplied with creaturesthat might be exhibited without an entrance fee or license because I had…
I don’t know what to do with beauty, with the curledlip, with the delicate bones and the cocked wrist,with that sudden sense of being hurled into a place I have no right to be, as if to existon such ground might be forbidden, allowedonly a glimpse, then what to do with it? We have missed…
The dog wagged her tailoutside the window, as Istared into her one good eye,wondering if she understoodwhy she was banished outside(I didn’t), then I decampedto the yellow kitchen, wherered flowers spread out of a vaselike the five points of a star(though scruffier), and I readpoems and listened to jazz,wishing I could fly, butthe ground is…
Our dead will not congregatebut come to us, distinctly, as they were:her stooped majesty, his cold dreamy self,that darling girl’s sly smile,which could be why, when I have them meetin heaven or here at night in my room,they make absolutely clearin the way they don’t open their mouthstheir disdain at my—what is it—it’s my hopethat…
for Eugene Dubnov Dead passion, like pain, is only a name,Word never to be made flesh again,Never again desire’s uncontrollable purge of the censoring brain.Nothing left, nothing left but language.Like the four-leaf clover shut fifty years in a dusty book on a shelf.Open the book. Such a dry clover! Smiles? Tears? Not for her, not for him;Only for…
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