Poetry

after John Clare All dark, and my feet against          the feed-room floor                   scuff cement, find their way          to the light, the switch, which flares on          with a snap of bird-                   wings’ nimble shuffle          and flight, the rafters blowing off feathers,          then my hands against                   the grain bin’s…

Eight years later the woman is given a house for five months at the edge of town in the desert. It’s August and the desert is green. When rain falls, she drives beyond the dark clouds. Past an antelope resting, legs under it, head raised, white marks. Drives slowly around a turtle. If the man…

was next week with a garden in it, next winter with the glow of the unborn. My back up against the mountain, face to the snowy field,—glassy branches of the apple tree. If there was a mistake somewhere I didn’t know it, I only knew the deodar choked on sky,—despite the rumor of unaltered roots….

Pain thinks of the sea the blackened fields the shore without daylight Pain thinks of the hour’s fires without witness the horses breaking & the sea breaking Pain thinks of the fields the tide rising in light’s black zone without body or breath Pain thinks of the sea without witness Pain thinks of Alcibiades

1. If it’s true jazzmen hurt a load of women like gods playing double-time to a packed house then it’s true a certain kind of woman hurts for jazz because I know Rebecca Geraldine slips in says all Charlie has is a horn and a habit I come in third Doris Sydnor lipsticked a hatcheck…

Further west there was the bee-buzz of Sirens impassioned like the jobless. Already gone were the thick shoes on the shore-rock as they changed to hooves. Gone as well all souls puffing behind the ship like an ash-cloud in a slow wind. Everything had come to be nude: the voices munching in me like a…

whose strict interpretations are no help to me this morning— you can’t meet my need to go through the world unseeingly; I must attend your demonstrations. Turn the pepper-leaves to earrings, knight the sugar, turn light to salt, cups to miners’ lamps then back to whole seasons of rain in the subcontinent. I move in…

Sad song, thousand-mile voice, the crows throwing their existential shadows about. About what? Sad song little while. Little wheel. So the red petticoat flashes. The singer claps. O love of my life, our flesh is pulled away no matter. Foot slam. How we try. Foot slam. To hold each other in our mouths. So now…

I had in hand my stamped yellow ticket and passed on information—that I should walk to the farthest end of the auto salvage yard for what I said I needed, a door. Loosely, I had in mind a modern underworld, the twisted, broken bodies organized by make and name for convenience. “Do you know what…