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…
She is unnaturally educated. Can take a word, crosshair it into place and begin its trajectory toward l’ancien. Greek, Latin, hieroglyphics. Whatness is concerned with content. So many private horrors stink of kerosene, bloodsport. Whereness is concerned with linkages. We begin almost demented by the Big Bang accuracy of metaphor. And the Word was ….
She tells me, “It smells like your mother” as we enter room 53 (twin beds, bath, 95 euros) of the Hôtel Jeanne d’Arc in Paris, and it’s true, there’s a heavy though not displeasing scent of lilac face powder of the kind used by old Southern ladies of a certain generation….
If description could outpace effusions of feeling, serif or sans serif, punctuated with dashes and in Amherst, could one say it was a peculiar summer. I tried to like what I’d always liked and tried to get there sooner rather than later. I’d forgotten I liked orange until on a scale of one to ten…
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…
—after the slaying of thirty-eight children at the church wall of Candelária The women would come in Chevrolets with soup in tins for the children. The women would come in Chevrolets, tin within tin, for the children. The children nearly sleepwalk in the exhaust. They are lost dragging their blankets through the long pepper fog…
translated by Ralph Angel to Manuel Torres, “Niño de Jerez,” who has the body of a Pharaoh Portrait of Silverio Franconetti Between Italian and flamenco, how would that Silverio have sung? The thick honey of Italy, mixed with our lemon, flowed through the deep wail of his siguiriya. His cry was terrifying. The old folk…
No products in the cart.