Poetry

I like to say. I must like to; I say it all the time, leaving parties early, acting put-upon. My little boy sucks blood out of my social life, friendships draining like my hopes to pitch for the Yankees, or find important fossils in my yard. Still, I love knowing my son won’t let sleep’s…

Sometimes I’ve wondered why it seems happy enough. It hangs around like a meek reminder of smallness, and chirps its slight sound, and flashes its dull brown, in the vague green of summer. And it must think that there in the spread of leaf, where it pauses on a branch, it is hardly ever noticed,…

The intern’s wand assayed your abdomen with wavelengths    sounding the nocturnal pool she swam within    pale cave dweller    tipped down to pass between existences    asleep forehead globed beneath her body’s question There she is    Everything’s okay    except the blood    a sudden flux enriched your gown tear in the placental wall    Nothing wrong the intern said   …

“Everything changes but the avant-garde.” —Paul Valéry A few words are left us from the beginning. Thank you, God, for allowing me a little to think again this morning. Touch my face, touch this scarred heart. Here, touch this upturned face as wind as light. So they labored for three or four decades to turn…

In a time zone all our own, we were a bubble of the past, a cleanser upon the last sentence of history. Lazing through tangled medieval lanes we offered everyone a do-over, a mulligan, and as time flowed backwards to greet us we imagined the world transformed— gashes were healed by knives, seatbelts were remembered,…

translated by Laura Rocha Nakazawa That night, the wind was a lament, a daring wound above the voice of the sea. That night, someone called me amid deep darkness to take me to the Melah, the Jewish quarter. Inebriated, I walked, covered in white tulles to protect me from the fine and savage sand. Alone,…

We melt the old thing into the new thing. Tongs, a ladle the size of a man’s head I fill with thoughts of molten steel. Fire below the cauldron, in our cigarettes, in the right hand of the man coming back from the bathroom with his skin mag. He’d tell me, were I to ask,…

As a child, as little more than an infant still learning numbers and words, I went to sleep after praying for uncles and aunts, for the living and the dead, with one hand in my mother’s hand through the bars of the cot, while I held in the other a bronze statuette of Mary given…

are tentative. Of course. To be an animal is to watch. Is to think about eating all the time. I watch them be so watchful. My window takes them one by one through trees winter strips down to a few species.                              When I saw the deer, I was beginning to type, not it came…