Poetry

However closer it might seem to art— the brightly colored bills, the graceful figures about to waltz off heavy coins—it pays for the gasoline, the decaf and baguette. To use a public toilet costs two francs, a little less than what I give the man without a leg whose sign I understand (another universal language,…

The last spike hammered into the last day meant not one more Chinese laborer would be lowered in a basket down the side of a mountain to separate the mountain from itself with a brand of dynamite that knew its own mind, never hesitating to render asunder whatever the Whiteman’s God had assembled on that…

for Flavio The plucked strings tremble & traverse the heart, back through that other strong muscle singing blood & guilt. Press a finger down & the message changes into blame & beauty, into the scent of a garden rising from peat moss & brimstone… the frets & shaped neck worked & caressed into a phantom…

At the stained window, a morning jay. I stop my scissoring, as if I could reclaim a Santiago of bird-call and sudden ease, as if I could annul the battle-gray maze of gutting jails, courthouses, morgues— purgatory where I bend over the burlap, again and again, to show the world the smashed black bell of…

They’re going to Glasgow, they’re going to Inverness     and to Skye. They’ll ride over bogs of musk ox and arctic foxes, tracing the scat of polar bears,     open-mouthed masses swallowing snatches of blue vacancies, ragged absences filling the empty air,     sea birds climbing, vanishing only to emerge in Reykjavík and west, soaring…

He took him outside and said, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” And He added, “So shall your offspring be.” I have lived in tents and know how faint a trace we leave behind us on the earth; how, when the body fails, the soul folds its…

In the days when a man would hold a swarm of words inside his belly, nestled against his spleen, singing. In the days of nightriders when life tongued a reed till blues & sorrow songs called out of the deep night: Another man done gone. Another man done gone.   In the days when one…

If I arrived early, I had to listen To hundreds of sewing machines Spiraling their high-pitched arias Up against the mill’s metal shell. Each woman, a soloist withdrawn Into her small cubicle of work, Sang the crazy hope of piecework— Another zipper, another dollar. A wall chart traced their numbers In money’s green line. It…

Has a glow to it, distant and round at the end of the mine shaft, a yellow malignant light. Once seen, it loses power, becomes tarnished and dull as river stones, lifted from their affair with water. Money that has lain too long in the vault no longer has value. The currencies we so believed…