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…
You drove all night through thunderstorms, the PA turnpike slick and narrow in the passes. The tractor-trailers roaring, and sleep whistling past your ears . . . My heart was where a hundred roads converged & then moved on At one point you drove under a mountain. Later the sun unfolded over the…
He was the first person I knew who spoke to God and to whom God replied. And he was the first person I knew who had written the great works of whomever you might name— mine own T. S. Eliot—though he affected no accent and wore a shrunken Grateful Dead T-shirt. It was not only…
Benny’s handsome, red brown like rust on a hoe. Empty headed cows loll in the pasture ignoring the mule’s bray. Light shines as easily through a cicada’s husk clinging to a tree as through a bottle of liniment or a glass of tea on the dinner table. The hems of his overalls fray and tickle…
Being red is the color of a white sun where it lingers on an arm. Color of time lost in sparks, of space lost inside dance. Red of walks by the railroad in the flush of youth, while our steps released the squeaks of shoots reaching for the light. Scarlet of sin, crimson of fresh…
The best boys were called: to buck hay till age seventy-five, to castrate a steer & rescue a breach-birth calf under a dusty light bulb, father eight or ten daughters & whip sense into their heads (their character would be their dowry), & one smoking bull of a son, inhale a cyclone …
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