Poetry

The moon so bright tonight that three crows flying low cast shadows like scythes through the cornfield they gleaned months back. The road is dirt-familiar. Fences I know post by post stretch out their strange new selves on the ground. The spruce creak overhead, smoke-soft. Out here, no one around, I sing a little and…

In the city that apparently never was—the here— where the hero dies and dies to no avail, where one is not oneself it suddenly appears (and you, who are you and are you there?) I found myself at the window at last, the room inside dark, it being late, the — outside dark, it being…

Love abandons you fear abandons you the summers fall on you in sheaves and who will — as you grow more fragile and smaller when the wind blows upward at the edge of the precipice — hold you back with a gentle touch.

She dreams redly of ashes and is hurrying, hurrying.

The names of stars: Sirius. Arcturus, Alpha Centauri, Vega. The names of Hungarians: Laszlo, Tibor, Zoltan, Sandor. The names of the great rivers: Nile, Congo, Amazon, Orinoco, Zambezi. The names of ships: African Dawn, China Bear, Coral Sea, Delta Queen. The names of the Spanish explorers: Cortez, Balboa, De Soto, Coronado. The names on the…

Everyone wore evening clothes, Got in and out of supercharged saloons The size of drawing rooms, And lived in a nightclub To the tune of watery. Latin rhythms I could pick up on my crystal set. Radio antennas also emitted Cute little bolts of lightning That flew through the air bearing The message: Balloonists Found,…

A mile into the sky our plane is practically nothing. This turbulence of air—also nothing, like the loose cells that float within the eye. Connecticut rolls and pitches below— Einstein was right, mistrusting his own feet, and so was Bishop Berkeley, for a plane glinting unseen among leaden clouds, droning toward the Atlantic unheard, is…

They have grafted pieces of an ape with a dog. . . Then, what they have, wants to live in a tree. No, it wants to lift its leg and piss on the tree. . .

The angel kissed my alphabet, it tingled like a cobweb in starlight. A few letters detached themselves and drifted in shadows, a loneliness they carry like infinitesimal coffins on their heads. She kisses my alphabet and a door opens: blackbirds roosting on far ridges. A windowpeeper under an umbrella watches a funeral service. Blinkered horses…