Poetry

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…

What is unremembered may be lodged she said a child     may not recall but will act it out in play doll on ground face against     tile see how he takes it by the hair by the foot by the tangled legs sweet mind made     of tangled legs and a patterned dress oh…

Numbers scraping their heels all night in the attic above them. The accounting was necessary but brought them near death. Like a fountain emptying itself for the tourists. Couldn’t the woman in the restaurant in the booth in the semi-     private room open her shirt? In one view the numbers represented his errors of…

Was wir nicht denken können, das können wir nicht denken; wir können also auch nicht sagen was wir nicht denken können —Wittgenstein A bewilderment, his wilting sense of betrayal, a wilderness— he composed the history of his own privacy. If you can’t imagine it you can’t think about it; you can’t talk about what you…