Poetry

Automobiles rout the Eternal City, their exhaust peeling like slow acid the skin and cartilage off statues, slipping the spirit from its moorings, as a million times a day, humans stand, backs pressed to the wall in the narrow streets, to let cars pass. One step, two, sometimes maybe even a string of uninterrupted steps,…

“I think you think I don’t know who you are,” she says at the window, “but I know what I know.” She sits across her tiny, white, bizarre, and sterile room, watching the falling snow. He stares at the half-done puzzle on the floor: Escher’s Waterfall, just more confusions for someone seldom coherent anymore, being…

In the same week that John F. Kennedy, Jr., with wife Caroline and her sister Lauren, crashed his private plane into the sea, a Kentuckian who worked for Tyson Foods— which gave big money to President Bill Clinton, who led the mourning for JFK, Jr.—fell into, not a vat, vat sounds undignified, like in that…

When he is deep inside me suddenly I see what he is doing: he is like a man in a tunnel clay walls moist, tracks gliding into the distance he carries a weak flashlight peers forward What is he doing? Is he afraid of snakes? No, he is seeking the other man the rival, the…

Here in North America we do not experience an atmosphere of butterflies. They do not fill the air with such camaraderie that the hills burn orange and yellow with filtering wings. So on Christmas morning I offer him the old camera back— the Leica with the fancy zoom lens. His fingers quiver whitely as he…

Outside a deconsecrated church turned nightclub on Sixth Avenue remains a thriving patch of moss, green as spring even in winter. Tucked along the edge of the foundation, it renews itself imperceptibly beneath our eyes, proof that people and their constructions change more quickly than plants and less predictably. We gather and disperse under this…

Scawmy, gray-souled November blinds the whale-road, pall draper over this ship bearing one whose name means of the ocean in a language he denied allegiance to, though his lines rang with cynghanedd—English reined by Celtic music, stitched tight as the coracle that wombed Taliesin—tribal rain-downs of sound, not enough: a small people lose their tongue…

It is not the fall of Nineveh. Not the sliding of the earth, the clashing of the icy stars. Nothing as bad as that. It is the silence, now, of a little black cat. The bowl where he ate. The chair where he sat. He’s curled in a ball on the laundry basket. The cat-nip…

The soldier plant is perverse. Common to civilizations, it is like nothing else in Nature. Blown down upon the richest earth, its seeds will not root: nourished by blood and tears, they will not ripen; even prayed over, celebrated in myth, imagined as history, tended to a fault, they never flower.