When I saw her in her urban kitchen—thin and smart in her charity-shop green dress—a glass wall was between uspolished spotless with some soft cloth of mistrust.All winter she’d lived up the hillin the gray house with the damp walls,the rains fading the fields. The snow—its ice-floe memories of Riga, darkness, home. The nights we’d…
Then the Great Dane becamean arrow of smoke in a wind pipe of smoke, so I had to burnthe body. He’d always considered himself king of infinite dominions:king of the bone, king of the living room, king of the elevator, kingof the field. The ashes I scattered in a park close to home, in casethere…
Why are people wearing antlers in the hospital cafeteria?—Because it’s Christmas, silly. Can’t you hear the sleigh bellsdrifting down like pesticide from all the hidden speakers? Mr. Johansson says he doesn’t get paid enough to wear a Santa hat,but everybody else just goes along with it. It’s winter, the elevators ding, the stunned relatives get off…
The Tartars say: After the wedding, we don’t need the music. And in Yiddish it is said: It’s the last one whom the dogs attack. The Italians say: The last to arrive must shut the door. The English say: The last suitor wins the maid. They also say: No one has ever seen tomorrow. Spaniards…
After I finally got over my sense of being a character in a book, and the innocence had gradually drained out of me through the holes life punctured in my container, that’s when I finally had time to stoop down and look closely at the dry, exhausted-looking grass next to the sidewalk, blowing back and forth all…
César Vallejo, Arago Clinic, Paris, Holy Friday April 15, 1938 It was you, César, they killed to the base of your forefinger, you. Certainly they shot Pedro Rojas too. No doubt Juana Vasquez was killed. The killers, poor also, were skilled. And Emilio, they shot him, in the back of the neck, after they made…
for Sangchen Tsomo Today it looks like a radiant darkness within the body and the sound of the dove in morning and evening and how the machine of my mind is never silent and how I pray for silence like a rain cloud combed through branches. Or the dove’s slow sound above last year’s grasses….
You said yourself, if it has a mouth you mustn’t trust it. May you lose this fight. Dragging the double-blade over your leg in the shower you think of his face. Such power you found in bathing him, his tattoos—needled with guitar strings and Bic ink while others kept watch down-tier: a woman with seven…
3In hospital I convalesced and read the melodrama presented in LeFigaro: “On the morning of 16 November, it is alleged, Professor ofPhilosophy Louis Althusser strangled his wife during what has beenruled a psychotic break.” I am not psychotic, though I have indeed killedmy wife. She is dead, it’s true. Not scuttling between trap doors beneaththe…
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