Poetry

At the funeral for the young manI’m trying to singthe complicated song And I’m running out ofbreaththere are too many Changes in directionin this song—some parts Are just for the choirthey sound greatup above in their loft Then the men singand that’s surprising—the women Are tentativewhen they singbut sweet The song is mostly about Jesuswho…

Sometimes when I’m reading, I’m distracted by the invisible book underneath the book I’m actually reading and the problem is this: it’s better. It’s like the superball under the couchthat your fingertips barely brush: the slightest contact and it’s gone, gliding easily away, because its form is nearly perfect, there, a sphere in the darkness…

Reminds me of early winter—field dressed, dangling from a porch girder like an upside-down garland of roses, no longer animal or drifting hole in a snow-blazed moor. How is it the body knows it deserves the ground before the clouds? The noose almost giving in? Suddenly thawed, dropped in its own shadow, held: un-mothered, sucked…

El Negro de Banyoles tugged the hemof his orange loincloth to save Europefrom shame. Storm clouds darkened the gallery skylights. Bruegel’s blind man led a parade of blind men into a ditch as a student sketched a copy at her easel. After the war, Vietnamese beat cradles, tools,and kettles from spent artillery shells.We might define…

I shouldn’t be, but I’m thinkingAbout the woman who got shotFighting over that sweat-soakedHeadscarf Teddy Pendergrass threwInto the crowd at one of thoseShows he put on for “LadiesOnly” the year I was born. HowMany women reachedBefore the tallest two forgotTheir new fingernails matchedPurses and shoes? I’m no good.I thought I’d be bored with menAnd music…

Between mud walls and the kivawind off the mesa broke his phrases,as we walked with Billy of the Parrot Clan and with others. The windowsmelting into blowing snow and the ripped-off split-level doors jammed on the adobes. Out of fleeting blue, then white,we caught bitesabout the time of killing Spaniards under the full moon,after the…

Describing her, I say, she’s a Modigliani face-wise but when she walks in her custom-size narrow bootsshe minces, or half-dances like a pony, the sort of pony who is dear and a little sillyand wears a hat with a ribbon. A little of this and a little of that—lacking a territorial integrity, she slides vertiginously…

I loved to walk down to the café where she workedand stare at the menu with the Brains Beurre Noirhalfway down the page. She’d come to my tablewith her order pad, pleasant and placid, dressedall in white like a nurse, and her wonderful smell,strong and female, would enter me like a sword.When I used to…

The vessel is simple, a rowboat among yachts.No one hides a Tommy gun in its case.No bluesman runs over his uke in a whiskey rage. The last of the Hawai’ian queens translated the namegift that came here, while Portuguese historians translatejumping flea, the way a player’s fingers pick and fly. If you have a cigar…