Poetry

I kneel by the redwood cutting basal roots, taunt slivers that shoot up from the base, and think how this tree is always reproducing. And if I’d birthed that child, the last, or the one before, they’d be grown now, cast off from the shore of my mothering. There’s an odd comfort in knowing my…

I. As a child, my mother boosted me into a dumpster of damp discarded library books. I fished out limericks, and Langston Hughes, and stack after stack of Hardy Boys. Years later, when I came out   to my mother, behind a closed door, I cried like a wolf. I didn’t know it then, but…

and then he turned it upside down in the garage where he considered its half-painted, dull fuchsia, cast-iron belly and drain hole fixed with what looked like a sawed-off copper snorkel, and how it rested on its gunwales that now were gutters. Something to behold so he beheld it.   Its eponymous feet he arranged…

I once believed we all have one chance to love deeply, an opportunity not only in the business of flesh and heart but in the loneliness of the soul, and if we miss it, as I thought I had on June 15, 1976, waking up in my room that fronted Half-Moon Lane, Herne Hill, London,…

Looking for the strange places, we become envious of whatever crawls from under rocks and out of seashells. We invented this new ocean, this nameless waterway to another sundial strewn city. We look for all the minuscule theaters enacting moss-covered recitations and pastoral renditions. This must be what we wanted, what we planned for and…

Translated by Gustavo Pérez Firmat     Life is too short. We’re always running late. Not enough days in our lives to learn anything. You wake up, you hug your girlfriend, you have breakfast, you work, you eat, you sleep, you watch a movie and you don’t even have time to read Seneca and convince…

Translated by Gustavo Pérez Firmat   She gave me a brief, hard hug, one of those you feel down to your toenails, a mortal leap into life, an incandescent caress, the kind that doesn’t last but scalds, sudden and fleeting: a spell rather than a squeeze. To be embraced like this once in a while…

When I imagine the dead I think of them doing absolutely nothing. Every morning a tiny red ant has left bites up my arm. I’m not god   as far as I know, though it’s possible. Mostly I feel like a child or elder, or a thing           scraped together from what’s in between.   One…

All I beg of this blighted year is to wake up well-slept early one August morning and to pull on yesterday’s clothes and ride the mile or two to the deli on Brackett Road when the sun is soft and low and the waves in the distance sound like a second breeze and to lean…