Poetry

Hard times, true But when hard times Come remember We are hard people, too.

Early in his narrative Flaubert constructs a magnificent ball at La Vaubyessard, the estate of the Marquis d’Andervilliers and in that chapter I direct my family to the moment just after the quadrille and before the cotillion when the air in the ballroom grows so thick and heavy the Marquis orders a servant to climb…

If never was the question. Even then. That when feels closer now might embarrass me before this window, more mirror than I would like at this hour, bathos of years ghosting face, throat, my impatient turning off of the lamp. Now I’m small again, and the world outside mysterious, perfumed, & large. Were I not…

The mule went blind and we were destitute. By day, it kept knocking its skull into trees. We moved to the barn where the mule curled up to us in sleep, its tubular hooves kicking through a dream. It wore a head bandage. My grandfather took on the role of the poet. “Never throw your…

The Muses are giving a thousand poets, painters, dancers The back of their hands, and having flown, seat themselves On the hypnotically spinning stools of Hartley Farms Where they are mouthing the giant menu with tremendous glee: Raspberry swirl, chocolate marshmallow fudge, swiss mocha almond… And motioning for Marina and Sophia in their green-and-white aprons…

He thumbs a corner of Verlaine,            plucks those pages like a dulcimer, even when the train lurches            not looking up from there but pawing at the air for a handhold,            and my God! what a head— stamped from some stuff…

The morning Jacob called us to the field and said he would take us back to the land of his father, Isaac— the one led up the mountain by his father to be bound and knifed and burnt for love of the god of his fathers, I thought, I will not. I would stay, I…

In between “host” and “glint” is ghost. A “hint” will hiss next to “guess.” For example also the virtue of frost is moisture And in icicles, glaciers or in a body’s cooling gestures the centuries pile up. Bone too, keeps a ballad interior. Lacuna if it could speak would be laconic. Winter seethes and wrecks us,…

after Gwendolyn Brooks       I. 1981. When I am so small Da’s sock covers my arm, we cruise at twilight until we find the place the real men lean, bloodshot and translucent with cool. His smile is a gold-plated incantation as we drift by women on barstools, with nothing left in them but approachlessness. This is…