Poetry

Hoping to find my way to the river, wide with April’s rain, and to see, perhaps, a few wildflowers, and maybe a cardinal whistling in a blossoming tree, I took a path I’d never taken before, first through woods and then a sloping meadow, across a fast stream, then into another meadow, above whose green…

The blinds of midnight are your hands saved from freezing. Such is the heart, and that pause, the somber hollow beneath. Sweet prophet, I name you and your ancestors fidget. I say your temples spill with losses and your shadow bursts with laughing. I say morning thickens with peregrines, flowing soft above the waves, flowing…

translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh Thankless street—little dry goods stores like sentries in Napoleon’s frozen army; country people peer into shop windows and their reflections gaze back at the dusty cars; Long Street trudging slowly to the suburbs, while the suburbs head for the center. Lumbering trams groove the street, scentless perfume shops…

About that country there’s not much left to say. Blue sun, far off, like a watery vein in the cloud belt. The solid earth itself unremarkable: familiar ruins littered with standing stones our people had lost the ability to decipher. How deeply had we slept? Beneath the jellyfish umbels of evergreens, each one a dream,…

after Vittorio Sereni Now, from the sweet fragrance of roses bitterness stings our nostrils. Our bay’s withdrawn from us, our beach littered with broken things—splintered oars, bits of old clay pipe from a long-ago shipwreck, fragments of china plates. Exciting, those days my townspeople scavenged rare cargo, furnishing their long winters with random wares. Now,…

The teleology of what I now perceive. Contraction. Exile. The afternoon we paddled home in two canoes from the end of the lake, the sky programmatic and threatening, the seven of us eager to reenter the domestic space—the raindrops long as spoons, later the guinea pigs discovered huddled under the station wagon, the reformulation of…

A word I can’t remember some black hawk of a word flew out of you at uninsurable speed but with a 4th grade pitch & intonation to it it sounded something like instinctual tho wasn’t— it must have surprised me so as to give me amnesia— and where did that come from I wondered what…

1. Tonight the clouds resemble French surrealists soft and electric and hot to the touch hustling north from the New York Public Library as if to grab the lease of the vacant apartment on E. 49th Street Frank O’Hara rented for $31 a month in 1952. Poor clouds. They have no sense of time and…

Make room, said he to the haystack. The point is great; take that; your groom arrives. Lie back; spread grass; never a borrower be. Rakes groom, he said, fakes doom—though choosers don’t mind beggars. Said the haystack: It’s a wedding night, so I’ll keep one eye half shut. (Clothes do make the man, said the…