Poetry

Translated by Carolyn Forché The curtain moved gently, dawn spilled milk over the city. I never saw you again like that.

On the second day, light; on the third, water, then the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, etcetera, until you come to the lesson-centered day you see the Milky Way as the downy drink   of morning. You’re ever aware of the shared terror of the shy kids souring the air in the classroom. The globe spins…

For Christian   You know it hadn’t a drop to do with love except that if I showed you how salt boiled on each winding stair back into that Baudelairean cellar eaved in velvet, your ear might love mine more for it.   Surely I’d gone partly mad but can it have been madness if…

From Look at This Blue   Your palms know where to go.                                                   What they imagine leads you. Everything we muster moves us along,   like water mirroring itself remembers                                                   where to flow, how to go there. In the dream you follow, in the dream we   fly over all of this direness     float….

six meters away from a charnel bike you lie with closed lids beneath maw of atmosphere,   blessing a forest of gravel, helmet on and face up. three of the rubberneckers on 999 calls,   and by your brown body, the towers of people living out a dreamers’ ending   of others’ displacement, where smoke…

Growing up in the South is like kicking a mule           to feel eternity in your bones.                     Or kicking a scarecrow, and calling it a mule. Or running your fingers over the rusted,           abandoned blade from a tractor                     in its eternal rest, and calling that a mule.   You’ll call anything a mule. Lace doilies           on…

we call them, that week           at our rented beach shack, with smiles equally, let’s admit,             tender and cruel. Heart, cancer, rope—           they flourished   without them. Designed tiny houses.           Protested often. A month in Guatemala.             Book clubs, movie groups, wine tasting           before the play. More friends   than either of us, solitary couple,…

In the piles in the backyard he and I sat in June’s pumped-up sun, half-blinded, sifting through rocks and crystals, winter’s lump and strand sprouting thin green leaves, lobes that would turn to vine and squash and yellow in fall’s sideways light. He grabbed fistfuls with clumsy fingers, smearing them on his mouth, wanting to…

who drowned in my two fingers,   denied the bitter sweetness of a black-   berry and nearly surrendered to the meat   of a melon, but considered, mostly, the craft   of thirst or death and tongued itself   goodbye. oh, gentleness. oh, small brown float   of a life. what news should I…