Poetry

Basho neither trusted nor distrusted the reeds. He was simply a poet on the way north. And being on the way north, he could choose to ignore them. That sound, after all— wind through them—was not the voice of a master. If there had been a master once, he was gone. Ah, to have loved…

The bell in you out of which I was rung long ago removed, I cannot go home. What did they do with your uterus? I think of it as a hat or a bird, resting on a head or flying away, over those mountains, on the other side of which I have never been. Maybe…

A spider webbed the cellar doorway the morning of my cleaning spree, pale star with him floating at the center. And for all his meanness, bigness, blackness, I let him be, having once squashed ants, crushed butterflies, stalking field and sidewalk. Love, come late in life, had softened all my anger. His net spanned half …

There’s a kind of leaving when you arrive even though it’s the place you’ve come from— how love can be alive There, though not for you, and while it’s like none of the first feelings, a recognition of what is passing flashes, itself passing—there were more deaths, but now there’s     only one, And what…

translated by Lyn Coffin, with Leda Pugh Oh, pain will die, I swear, when I succeed in making a Myshkin of these tears to master agony, quietly, there where I burn with beautiful helpless need, where voices go mute, and feelings wake late, before finally disbanding. To smile (to reach understanding) just as He said….

translated by Kirk Nesset I’ll be an easy cadaver to carry through woods and over the sea; in a carriage, on a white ship, as the oboe laments, or bassoon, over the droning croaking of toads. I’ll be an innocent cadaver, quietly regarding my remains, while despite me a requiem sounds, the moan of a…

Sometimes in the fading winter light     that streaks my desk by six o’clock        revealing grains in aging oak, like desert sands, I imagine, before leaving my     shelved books to laze with those I love        before the easy flicker of some talk show on TV, that I stay back this time,    …

Hot Los Angeles summer days, late ’50’s, a seven-year-old Shut in the tiny, midtown apartment on South Kingsley Drive, I’d flip on the TV to the black-and-white game shows, Rerun comedies, and half-hour detective dramas, Seeking company, avoiding the soaps, news, and cartoons. One of my favorites for a while was a show called Kideo…

It could come right now as a dit-dah of rain,     mere pine needle lost in a tree-stack of beads,        thorn expelled from red dot, print felt            an inch from a finger, pursed lips speaking in tears. It makes you look dotty. Easily amused. It starts     like a Spanish ¡—down on your…