Poetry

  • Either Or

    Death, in the orderly procession of random events on this gradually expiring planet crooked in a negligible arm of a minor galaxy adrift among millions of others bursting apart in the amnion of space, will, said Socrates, be either a dreamless slumber without end or a migration of the soul from one place to another,…

  • Late Summer

    Wild mint at our door, honeysuckle, fragrant August wind shifting, dying—nectar, salt, all one breath. Dragonflies mating in the greeny shade of the tamarisk, their brief lives unfettered. On the shore tiny green-black mites, terns— and the calligraphic beach grasses yearning with the breeze like a printmaker’s lines. Sand-washed, sun-warmed fragments—“sea glass”: wines tossed—when?—from a…

  • Bottle

    “If god is everywhere then he is also in this bottle.” —Ben Vautier How unlucky that god would lie low for so long in a fluxus gallery in St. Louis. Maybe not. Maybe we’ve overlooked holy rubbish everywhere, sacred cans and cartons in trash cans worldwide all being pecked at and treasured by animals who…

  • Two Ways to Play Shylock (David Suchet and Patrick Stewart, Royal Shakespeare Company)

    David plays him as a Yid with an accent and a stoop. To Patrick he’s the ur-outsider aping the locals. He wants what translates in Italian— money more than a child whose Christian not Hebrew name’s the Tiffany of 1580. Trading her mother’s ring, she makes Dad’s marriage look as legit as a monkey’s. Hire…

  • Trans-Siberia

    Translated from the Slovene by Michael Biggins with the Author Every ball is a bloody, beautiful mask of powerful people. We make up pretzels. I always did like chickens. O, slender fez, mildew perching on its fur. The poet is an oafish celeb on a hood. Of every wondrous power. On a hood. I glance…

  • Honey and Holofernes

    Translated from the Slovene by Michael Biggins with the Author I’ve invented a machine that, as soon as a goldfinch opens its throat, starts dumping bags of concrete inside. Who licked the candies into concrete, we don’t know. Who then brought the concrete to life, we don’t know. The goldfinch sails. The goldfinch sings. Where…