Poetry

Sometimes I’ve wondered why it seems happy enough. It hangs around like a meek reminder of smallness, and chirps its slight sound, and flashes its dull brown, in the vague green of summer. And it must think that there in the spread of leaf, where it pauses on a branch, it is hardly ever noticed,…

The intern’s wand assayed your abdomen with wavelengths    sounding the nocturnal pool she swam within    pale cave dweller    tipped down to pass between existences    asleep forehead globed beneath her body’s question There she is    Everything’s okay    except the blood    a sudden flux enriched your gown tear in the placental wall    Nothing wrong the intern said   …

In the van we are as corks in water, bobbing, filled with air. Earplugs jam up my ears with the simple fact that a secret music illuminates the window-better from my side of the inside seat, crammed up against a housewife, cow-like from Des Moines with wads of Kleenex in her fist, arriving with Broadway…

Clashing paper umbrellas of red and orange. The fur of the moth’s eye- spot centered: wind shakes the poppy, and the poppy shakes the head of the pod shapely as Egyptian skull, bone-dry. Spliced spore, sap and milk: tiny black seeds seamed inside; like the pocket walls’ little wooden veins holding the paper umbrellas up….

The white mouse went first, pink eyes, pink feet, then the ace of hearts, the quarter and half-dollar,     the pigeon, the cat, once the dog, who didn’t howl for a good hour,     wherever he was, our old man’s hands faster than our eyes as we lined up on the picnic table seat to…

You are never what you seem. Like barbeque, you tell me time doesn’t matter, that all things wait. You take long as it takes. Wife to worry, you can sit forever, stewing, grown angrier by the hour. Like ribs you are better the day after, when all is forgiven. Death’s daughter, you are often cross—bitter…

There’s our son at the end of my hook     riding over the Detroit River where Tecumseh’s still rowing     towards his oblivion. This boy we’re casting to the land     of the leaping frogs. My lass lives on the floor     where the fish are frying, her spine snapped in half     the way…

translated by Clare Cavanagh     He dressed in black, like a clerk at an insurance bureau who specializes in lost causes. I’d spot him on Urzednicza rushing for a streetcar, and at Krzysztofory as he solemnly discharged his duties, receiving other artists dressed in black. I dismissed him with the pride of someone who’s…

I was worn out, lost, and sixteen in China at 6 p.m., everyone suddenly in a purchasing frenzy, when he stopped me with a smile that just turned me upside down: gold caps on one side, gaps on the other. I could tell he was more human than most people, or more kind. He was…