original Irish poem with English translation by the author faiteadhsúile feithidei bhforaois fearthainnei mBorneó the blinkof an insect’seye in the rainforest of Borneo chuir gála gaoitheag réabadh na tíre,ag pleancadhscioból tuí set gale forcewinds rippingthe country,battering tin sheds is monarchan iata,scoileanna réamhdhéantais tithe taibhsíó Cheann Mhalainnego Carn Uí Néid and shut factories,prefabricated schoolsand ghost housesfrom…
The deer has the eyes of a deer in headlights. I must have them too, sitting in the car, driving. The deer came out of nowhere. It is magic. It’s the kind of magic you wish wouldn’t happen. The deer must be thinking the same about me. The road came out of nowhere, this man…
Our dead will not congregate but come to us, distinctly, as they were: her stooped majesty, his cold dreamy self, that darling girl’s sly smile, which could be why, when I have them meet in heaven or here at night in my room, they make absolutely clear in the way they don’t open their mouths…
Would Jane Eyre come to the Information Desk? The speaker voice at Heathrow airport said. I stood and waited for her to appear, Jane Eyre. And when she came near, she was shouting: My name is Bertha; my name is not Jane Eyre I come from Kingston, Jamaica. Look here. Well, they’d placed handcuffs on…
I’ll never forget the wind the corner whispered, nor the windowed darkness that was more a frame for the world’s highrise loneliness. I’ll never forget the days we lingered beneath our fingerprints and how we were each other’s private sacrament. Brooms and mops hung behind doors like secret agents. The crooks of our knees ached…
Way down in Egypt’s land, meaning Memphis, I watched a party waltz the gangplank, preening past a peacock preening on the dock. Antebellum ball-gown frippery complemented Confederate gray, every man a colonel or above, and the ladies pealed flippant imitations of a cavalier past until one sweet peach enfolded in crinoline refused another’s “nigger-lipped” cigarette…
Go, my only friend. I know this voice has lost its wintered savor—my skeptic’s mewling cries fritter out across the sad Atlantic’s no man’s land. If I bury spoons, will you wait for them to bloom? Estrangement—it had seemed so accidental— was with us from the first, a doorjamb fixity. It wasn’t that randoms fingered…
The brim that broke the river came on land. Its skirts were vast from so much rain and made the grass beneath it dance, the wild hair of the drowned. We trailed it onto the road to where a cattle-grid gulped it down and where a hedgehog whirled in its mitten of thorns. Back then,…
Those no-treads. Scott and Tom and Scott Scott and Tom Tom, wealth-creator or small billionaire or lawyer or even, even, woman, groomed for the succession from yea-high, or there on sudden impulse or empanelled cosmeticists’ and focus groups’ say-so, committed to working (or porking) across the aisle, “humbled” (read insufferably puffed-up) to “serve” (recte rob…
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