Cobras rise out of raw pits for them, coils swaying below each diamond head and red forked tongue. When in old robes they walk across a bed of sin, steam hisses as if each footstep held a pod of water and to the murmurs of the crowd, they lift their feet unscathed, and grin. And…
I am translating the world into mockingbird, into blue jay, into cat-bombing avian obbligato, because I want more noise, more bells, more senseless tintinnabulation, more crow, thunder, squawk, more bird song, more Beethoven, more philharmonic mash notes to the gods. I am translating the world into onyx, into Abyssinian, into pale-blue Visigoth…
Of Memory I. Messala Corvinus forgot his own name II. One, by a blow with a stone, forgot all his learning. Another, by a fall from a horse, forgot his mother’s name and kinfolk. A young student of Montpellier, by a wound, lost his memory, so that he was fain to be taught the letters…
Hawthornden International Writers’ Retreat There’s a poem I’m always trying to write. It always begins the same way. Oh, listen, listen— It is the urgency of the words that compels me. I know what the poem is about, it’s about the world and its shining. But what comes after these words is…
I: I’d rather have a granddaughter who’s a whore than a grandson who’s a faggot like you. In the empty parking lot of St. Jude’s Church in Westchester, on a summer day, she lets go and falls to the gritty pavement while I pedal and pedal and glide without training wheels for the first time….
What did Sinclair Lewis say about sweet potatoes, or rather Upton Sinclair, or red potatoes? Crows. Crows all day. And the river holding on to the mist, sixty watts of sunshine at noon and the smell of cadmium under the bridge, coal yards and dumps, the boat launch south of the locks, fission in a…
Standing off a bit, I watch one of them fly out of its form, so clenched up on its own that it does not understand the wash, the river carved into its underground. When it is here or there, it is always somewhere else, an optic hop away from the housecat moving slowly towards the…
If the dog were a cloud, he could run through blue pastures, and never catch his hair on a fence. He could leap at other clouds and they would not growl or bite. He could retrieve the sun, which would glow in his mouth, and light up all his teeth. And how pleased his mistress…
A little atomic number on the sale rack. Lots of castles. Lots of knives and forks. Lots of closet skeletons. The fitting room flooded with the strands of the score he left on her answering machine. A drive-in movie screen: their cloud-built bed stuffed with opera lens and whatnots. How they loved to Euro the…
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