Poetry

We meet day-plain and inches away, faces facing off in a garden,                                           kissing closed kisses, solemn, bone-dry, and exquisite as the leaves of our sweating faces                                   glisten, sheens giving back each tree’s green. My greenery grows untoward,                    branches burst windows, menace doors, what sky is wide enough to house me?                               Breath…

An Adirondack chair, painted in a primary color, in one corner, under the pergola, the blooming vine appealing above—people an abundance of themselves, prodigal in sunglasses, in the shade. Will I speak to him, and if so, do I call him “Mr. Secretary”? He groans into his chair, opens the Times, reads, then glances at…

translated by Clare Cavanagh I look into her face and see ever more clearly time’s subcutaneous machinations. Death’s terrifying progress. Which will alter nothing in her features, her mouth’s shape, the color of her hair. Nothing, since so little: only this light, this motion, this warmth. Only what isn’t actually there, what can’t be seen,…

Her pale square face looks out like Fate— through a dark kerchief clipped under her chin with a narrow, elegant pin; you can make out a white headband under her shawl; her jacket and skirt cut from the same coarse dark cloth. The uneven stitches of her hem hand-sewn— dark leather men’s shoes sticking out….

translated by Lyn Coffin, with Leda Pugh The earth opened wide. Rain, a doctor, dripped remedies. All night, moving down the mountainsides were molten seas. You, my fevered country, now must spend your last moments caught in delirium’s coil— peacefully, tenderly, you ask at the end: Where’s the boil? 2 My soul, your wind died…

Never weaned from anger (the stars incline but do not require), left alone she thinks hard thoughts mean as snow at harvest: home is paradise to cats, hell for wives, she thinks, are all babies slippery? boys hate old men, but women despise them: she thinks, bed full of bones, and bad usage aggravates the…

Strange arachnid, distant cousin of deer ticks and potato bugs, those armored pellets that live between bark and wood, stone and dirt. Unlike them you wash up hapless on beaches more a bowl than a shoe. You come in squads after mating in the waters of your birth, dragging the useless scabbard of your tail….

Once thought to be extinct . . . lives at depths of up to 1,500 feet . . . dies of shock when brought to the surface . . . almost nothing is known about it . . . —National Geographic I saw you in a book: bubble-eyed and staring, mouth spookily aglow with a…

In the darkness I can see every line of your face. As if you are in my womb. Your fingers feel for its entrance and I am your mother, imagining what you will look like when you are born. When I climb after you into the freshly laundered white duvet, and look at your face…