Poetry

is one of the greatest mysteries of nature. * Every day a pressure rises, brutalities brew; the pure in spirit are tried as they accommodate the mechanical demands of the physical, repetitive world. Repetition for Divinity is myth; repetition for mortals is labor. “Row, row, row your boat.” * The mock-Homeric and the beautiful Alexandrian…

Stories come to us like new senses a wave and an ash tree were sisters they had been separated since they were children but they went on believing in each other though each was sure that the other must be lost they cherished traits of themselves that they thought of as family resemblances features they…

Then out of the darkness leapt a bare hand that stroked my brow, “Come along, child; stretch out your feet under the blanket. Darkness will give you back, unremembering. Do not be afraid.” So I put down my book and pushed like a finger through sheer silk, the autobiographical part of me, the am, snatched…

There, in the same spot as the annihilation of the world, love of existence stood. We walked along. In boulevard windows: plates, hat-like napkins set for the imaginary meal. Each act of revenge has love as a twin but could art convey this without violence? In this parabola, I recalled the little dragon in the…

Shucking corn on the veranda, my sister said she didn’t care that her father had dropped by, or that I’d finally met him. Later, after the dark started to rake in, I found her outside again, staring at the sweep of fallow fields and shadows around our mother’s rented house, the curious row of weathered…

Placed on the earth for this little moment I wake today to entertain the world. But, Lord, before first light only the clouds my answerer, even to no question, I stare outside, at the black broken universe I cannot see: trees, clouds, birds, stones, fence, grass— all the accouterments of worship on my eyes and…

“Like one man milking a billy goat another holding a sieve beneath it,” Kant wrote, quoting an unnamed ancient. It takes a moment to notice the sieve doesn’t matter. In her nineties, a woman begins to sleepwalk. One morning finding pudding and a washed pot, another the opened drawers of her late husband’s dresser. After…

In college I loved Browning’s phrase— was it in “Two in the Campagna”?— “tangled ropes of lasagna” and even today I think it may have been pasta which civilized the Italians so much they refused to fight for Mussolini—remember how Marshall Badoglio’s armies surrendered in Africa tutti and rapidamente?—and even the names make you smile:…

A solitary clock behind bars, floors forbidden to street shoes, exit signs— one, two, three, four: fine—& waxy cries of boys, one mine, practicing their dribbling & bank shots. My eyes closed, the volley of Spaldings pounds like opening night of Operation Desert Storm, or Shield, or whatever war our Sonys dust up next ….