Poetry

translated by Marilyn Hacker He wants to have The operation but He’s crazy The doctors are Crazy and then Raising her voice to The heavens she told him Never! He just needs simple Cucumber compresses A lot of love Anyway if he dies She’ll kill herself.

    I imagine he’s sitting nearby like a Sufi on a roof, hollow-eyed,     intense, burning at midnight. Something snaps. He has learned     the art of breaking, & being broken. His call is naked as a needle, sharp     as images he sorts from afterimages, arranging them like flames. In the pines     he…

Is there a print left by the toes upon the umbered surface of the stone on which the farmer’s daughter stepped in the springtime to reach the top of the fence between the cornfield and the water meadow— I would like to have inquired whether somewhere there does not remain the trace of her delicate…

And this time when she asks, The world will end, won’t it? a black river of crows will be rowing out above you, heavy oilcloth of wings working over slanted roofs, dark tents of sycamore. She will tilt her small head skyward. So that watching her, you could almost glimpse the secret greed of time…

Alice is pushing 40, her sprawling hips so sprawled that when she busts out of the White Rabbit’s House, Lewis Carrol has to play handyman, nailing the door and roof back on. Every time she tries to sneak away through the garden, the path flings her back, like a treadmill going too fast. She crushes…

Something’s kept me away, perhaps an all-too-familiar voice laced with paranoia streaming through a phone unhooked from its cradle, dangling in that empty room. Hanging up not an option. Her ashes in an urn for the third straight year and now I wonder how it was I never could get through to her. Yet here…

for my wife, Katherine The film of your brain is a map drawn by conquerors flying the banner of exploration and misnaming all the islands, yet we sail through the clouds swirling in this hemisphere, navigate rivers of silver till we find the white slash circled in red that tells us stroke, hemorrhage, as if…

At last she decided to speak to the moon. Having no other choice, she begged it to set her free. Why me, she asked, when others are content to sit on their haunches all night peering at your sullen face; or feel your granite pull beneath skin and obey, opening wave upon wave. When no…

He’s on top of her, barely moving, at the swimming hole I’ve called mine for years. Here, to be anything but naked is nearly sacrilegious. In the quick red canyon water sears the dusty plain. My daughter plays, oblivious to them, delicious in her two-year skin, but I can’t not look (and must if I’m…