Codices, caxtons, concordances— your books, dusted, rearranged, reshelved. But it’s what falls out of them most fascinates: feathers, letters, fortunes, tickets, baseball, post- and birth- day cards stashed among the savored or as-yet-unfinished pages. What would get you back to that one? A prison term perhaps, or the long convalescence you have sometimes thought you…
Not one stone is left on another, and not one day Is left to rest on another, either, But bad news kicks it underfoot and tramples it. At each day’s end, an American with aging vision Bends closer to a soup can picked off a canned goods shelf To spot the betrayal lurking in its…
After the second act blacks out, you head to the lobby, to feel the crowd stream around you, bearing secret energies, as through water heaves a sullen wave, as through the flag speaks a jubilance of wind. When you stop near a table of brochures, a fat, sunburned boy looks (instantly sizing you) up and…
When the seaweed’s bladders swoon and the tide batters and tears at them, sending the bladder wrack to toss with the seal’s gross afterbirth, I say, Bladder wrack, if the sea cares and is good, why should the sea slap you to rocks, leave you in thirst, come to slap again, forty days, forty thousand…
Viareggio bus station, Italy He lifts him like they’re wrestlers in the ring or like in Pollaiuolo’s Hercules and Antaeus, only neither of these guys is a hero and both have been drinking all morning—this isn’t the Uffizi and what they’re doing isn’t in a painting: it’s a park, James Taylor’s going to sing tonight…
May replace passport photos. Often the subject is at rest, Isolated from a group, or otherwise Imagined as an individual More than the sum of a series of quirks (“Reality effects”) The poems generally are forced To jettison run-of-the-mill data The ideal such description Will give you a sense Of how someone’s eyes flash When…
I remember when I was four a book seemed from heaven and then, when I was eight, it seemed a field. * How large the world has become, the thoughts, capable. I wanted to look at that, just that. * I thought I would never speak again. But there are books, transformed, and souls that…
push up the wick, when the dark comes early. That’s marrow dark. Waiting-for-the-savior dark. Keep spare lamps for when cocoons turn mute: their prophecy spilled scale & tattered wing. For when no wasp will overwinter & no beetle. When that iridescence litters fields lace tight your goods. Somewhere in the barn a cache: broken bottle,…
black-eyed susans sound abused, as if the night beats flowers up and needs help loving as people love who sign letters xoxoxoxo, which reminds me of football coaches showing massive men how to destroy massiver men on a chalkboard at halftime. if you are a flute thrown out a window on the way to montgomery,…
Summer 1973 - Digital