Poetry

Icarus in Dedalus’s Studio

A wing’s a bridge                        made of light and lightness. Such an unattaching, then then, such a humming garden. What is finished is brutal. Pink            swallow, brown wings and tail                                 acock on a porcelain vase, can be diving so, only if whole is the greenest color.                                 Return, world. Be a little whether….

Unknowing

If you materialize this thing, which is a lamp, which is a cup,     as practice. If you light it, if you drink from it. Although the long day is still ahead, you may behave in the dark as you do in the dark. The light won’t find you out, it will make room, it…

Walking Among Them

I cannot tell you the whole story because the whole story will not fit in my mouth. I have always had a small mouth, small tongue, tiny lungs. If I were to try to tell the whole story, I might expire. All over you, and you in your best black robes. It’s like trying to…

They Flee

And now they range beneath wheatfields in unmanned chambers out of range. They point themselves at celestial targets; today they are rediscovering snow. Perhaps they whispered unto you the sickness that cut a breast from your breast; possible. Love’s surgeon had it in for you, he spread you at the chancel and unmasked. Then hauled…

Orange Tree

Dream of the bitter greenish flesh of a tiny orange tree we grew upstairs in our bow window: I am eight or nine. In life, I hoped the flesh would end up sweet the way the fist-sized oranges in grocery bags turn sweet, the way bought fruit does almost always. But in my dream I…

Lives of the Noncombatants

Poor Lorca, what a sissy, his whole life he knew this was coming and still he looks like an idiot, suddenly he stops defanging the piano in his underwear and gets all morbid, embarrassing the diplomats. He asks his parents for more money for a silver pant leg, wristwatches to fill a fishbowl, and then…

So I went out into the nervous system of the air–

So I went out into the nervous system of the air— Bearing beneath my lettrist overcoat my village The monumental city long ago breathed in And held                 Went out into the signal and static— Rivermutter steeplebell and traffic—net of noise Knotted by sirens                               Into the brutal red dream Of the collective—humming there behind…