Poetry

In one film, a man turning the pages of a book. In another film, a man turning the pages of a book. Outside, the snow and the semis cover everything with mud and someone talks to someone else. The snow creaks like an old floor. Inside, the paper weighs the same as the inside of…

Call me What You Will. This for your complicated hands— my best mechanical tree. Test?                                  No thank you. Question?                           The rivers run in circles. You noticed.                       We noticed. (thinking) Duet!                                  & the pin factory . . . Sweet extrovert, it is making pins. You will, you know, but I shouldn’t sing              Introvert! Introvert! if I…

Asking     Carrying a bucket full     Of a broken window or     Watching people and their mirrors on     TV; the woods tamped down     By snow and the very high iron of trees;     Air passes from purple to blue into     Black pitched lower than trees;     Glass for this     Half-week….

—at Dal Pescatore, Cannetto sull’Oglio, just outside Mantova It’s just as the waiter has brought us                             a single buttery dumpling        stuffed with pecorino, parmigiano, and ricotta that arrives after the porcini mushrooms                             and the seafood risotto        and before the snapper with tomato and black olives   and the duck in balsamic…

Brush of sunlight on the dry grass. These shadows blowing black up the mountain, and elsewhere there is laughing, you are moderate, see, I am there. A noise from inside the neighbor’s window. In the dark drifts you gather— let drop the poor idea— kisses him swiftly and leaves. That we may be increased. Thrum…

One moment, the mountain is clear in strong morning sunlight. The next, vanished in fog. I return to Tu Fu, afraid to look up again from my reading and find in the window moonlight— but when I do, the fog is still there, and only the ancient poet’s hair has turned gray while a single…

My name in the black air, called out in the early morning. A premonition dreamed: waking, I beheld a future of mourning. Our partings were rehearsals for the final scene: you and I in a desert, saying goodbye on a white September morning. The call came. West, I flew west again. Impossible, but the sun…

I was sitting at a picnic table at one of the godforsaken places peeling an egg as if in this act I could recover what there was of gentleness and I was alone unless you counted the two forms of life, one sea and one land, that fought over the eggshells and stole pieces of…

An absolute sound, this soughing above the tops of trees. For the longest while I couldn’t look up, so much did I long to see the ocean, rough and whitened. Such soft ululations, such a drumroll of feathers! Yet it was no other weather than Wind. I looked up; the sky lay blue as always,…