Thus what we’ve learned is that our greatest poets were death-obsessed loners who seldom enjoyed the pleasures of lovers despite living in a constant state of sexual excitation. They started as revolutionaries and atheists, or they went to Harvard and voted Republican and mowed the yard. The night sky was starry and told them stories….
After the initial terror of laying out your clothes in front of everyone, it’s where to put the money, the clothes before water or the detergent first or in between the clothes. Your fingers find the quarters, slip them into slots, push and listen to the water, vaguely familiar, like your heart between the covers…
Reagan dead this Saturday the last— the falsifying mind cratered, the brain that was a salt block America loved to lick— but Ray Charles struck down yesterday outlasts him by three days forever now— the basic blues chord a power of the arisen— to the Lord’s child betrayed by lightless waves…
They try to watch themselves, drifting in a white sigh, the boats and trees, and themselves, too, when they think of it, spun from sheets of gauzy droplets with which to tar the morning white and walk upon it. The horizon yawns. The earth is liquid. They can feel it, and not just it but…
Well, there’s the lack of vacuuming, carrot juice spills on the ivory couch, dust running along the floorboards like a pet, veiling the TV, sills, the furnishings of books, shoes without glue, the lack of comfortable seating or dining, the canopy I gave away, childhood desk sold, gold chair left in a spidery garage, rose…
A missing tooth and a fang. A bloom and a sandstorm. A love letter and a trapdoor. A can opener and a kiss. A maraca and a spear. Lowered eyes and a suddenly somewhat disconcerting blow job. A baroque flute flourish and an eerie silence just beyond the cabin door. A tube top and…
His music, Charles writes, makes us avoidable. I write: emissary of evening. We’re writing poems about last night’s bat. Charles has stripped the scene to lyric, while I’m filling in the tale: how, when we emerged from the inn, an unassuming place in the countryside near Hoarwithy, not far from the River Wye, two twilight…
No waste of shame, no wilting of the flower, the stick shall not break, the bat shall not splinter, no friend will wake, no end of winter; nor remembrance of splendor to counter the paper bull’s power will cover the lake with ice when gamblers spill the dice: the mirror shall not tilt, the quick…
a man sitting across from me in a French restaurant in New York City a name is a word is the first form of domestication an explanation of the secret language he spoke with his father in the marketplace in la Villette: lincsé for five francs, larante for forty and the word for money, le…
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