Poetry

I was worn out, lost, and sixteen in China at 6 p.m., everyone suddenly in a purchasing frenzy, when he stopped me with a smile that just turned me upside down: gold caps on one side, gaps on the other. I could tell he was more human than most people, or more kind. He was…

remembering Lem Norrell All those rhetorical contraptions of the metaphysicals prying us loose from the world!                     And those licentious exhortations to squeeze the day! Something about the Anglican burial brought those back, and with them your voice rousing those     metaphors off the page. It’s not like I didn’t get a heads-up, right? But…

Every morning in the hour before you wake, when the sun squares off against the kitchen floor, and the cups from last night still wear necklaces of wine, stoles of milk, I hear waves in the walls. A tide swells from the corner behind the fridge: crest and crash, and that silty forgiveness of sand…

But as we rose from the café table in Trastevere who could not help but notice that it was as beautiful a day as could be imagined in Rome: an early October afternoon in mid-July. There’s little you can’t say against Rome, from the infernal roar to the eternal siestas. There are portents: the coppery-skinned…

translated by Clare Cavanagh Late afternoon, light snow. The Musée d’Orsay is on strike, beside it a gray lump huddled on the sidewalk’s edge: a bum curled in a ball (maybe a refugee from some country caught in civil war) still lying on the grate, packed in a quilt, a scrap-heap sleeping bag, the right…

Arriving in December on a Greyhound from Paducah, you saw the usual sun rising on your right over the bowed houses of Dearborn as a wafer of moon descended on your left behind the steaming rail yards wakening for work. “Where are we?” you asked. In 1948 people still talked to each other even when…

When I came back from Mexico, I looked like death. My mouth broke down, weather-beaten. I was paying for my sins, my palate had melted. I could touch my brain directly with my tongue. It was painful, terrible, and sweet. While Svetozar was sitting outside, the cabinet of dental instruments was crashing down. I brought…

translated by Maria Koundoura and the author   In its center all is water you were saying that night, if you remember as the fire was dimming the light on the moist fingernails slowly peeling the dry skin from the orange before sinking into its yellow succulence A woman, the boy, fruit in this world…

translated by Clare Cavanagh When he described the park, the path, sick fires glowed in his cooling eyes, his voice grew stronger and his hands tried to be what they once were, when deft squirrels trustingly took sugar from them. Now I’m here. And everything is as he’d remembered: the yellow forsythia, the poplars’ shady…