Poetry

The horse, Susan said, because it is the blankest of slates, or because our success—our genes’ successes—are linked, has been written on extensively by our needs. Dumb giants pawing the ground, father, mother, escape, sexuality glistening and rippling, forelock and fetlock, footloose and fearless, or the pleasures of the fearful—fleeing the sudden gesture, careening through…

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….

The goddess of the hunt is not herself. She is tired having waited, having sniffed around surgically. All her arrows jiggle with nothingness, so she turns herself inside out: her tongue is a tail, her throat a torso, her stomach bundled with eyes and claws. She feels, on her cheek, a new weather. Angels drift…

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…

Then we want to drown or sing To skip ahead as if lost in the past When I say we I mean everything all at once When I say forever Each of us counts our desires And the desire to gather Fills our hearts We create the simplest words We live alone in absolute silence…

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…