Poetry

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…

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…

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…

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— 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…

—odor of hot stone, like a sibyl          ironing, is it not so, her duns and indigos                 . . .          odor of love         sea ammonia —a licknut leaf diving out after boyish pleasures,          as Apollo hung out       whole days with Hyacinthus—jack-juice outlaws:          one of them the green sometimes seen in…

Yesterday’s snow falling again and already. Falling steadily among the vowels, the tall consonants. Alertnesses scumbling among the cabbages. The eyebrowed jay named by a man named for a star. Stellar’s. When I say the word the pleasure happens on my palate and I am never the same person again. Smoke. Granular. Piñon. Clouds slumping…

No dark field in which to wait No collapsed building How nothing we did exists Like a hiding spot where all get caught So what      and then      to do or to imagine, When a beating sound exists Like a ticking sound Against ourselves, past the subject As if hearing a distant conversation It’s not against…

Widening line of light What isn’t inked            (“the area of its competence A visit to the morgue at night? (Averse?)                           Traversed By the frame A hand (reaching in? withdrawing                           (From outside To lift                 (this sheet) Sheer homesickness—the text * Awoke a serial homesickness (the text) for a place you lived in—off and…