The viola sounded like a buzz saw and looked like the sun on methamphetamine. It was necessary, no not necessary, (which was the quid pro quo of mom and pop on Long Island) but amusing, to have something European be dragged through Louisiana in the rain. Our geography was indoors, in the exclamation and point…
The walking on alone of it, stooping (I could say I was picking flowers) the birthday near Easter when the word, girl, seemed foolish, the resistance to make the past read like Rilke when it read like KRAZY KOMICS, the adoration of Rembrandt despite the vogue away from Rembrandt, the feeling of kinship…
The May morning I came to where I was not expected. The May morning hazy with the mad swirl of maple seeds, where you stood blocking the door. “Where is Mom?” My voice lifted innocent as a child’s balloon. My face needy and vacant, the face you’d loved, or someone had…
Clear out here you don’t hear screams, shots, chants of mobs raging, ambulances or fire sirens; maybe some rabbit a fox caught, some young bird squirming in a cat’s jaws or the clenched claws of an owl. Otherwise, the outstretched countryside lies still. Until here in my bedroom’s wall- absorbing darkness,…
One moment, the mountain is clear in strong morning sunlight. The next, vanished in fog. I return to Tu Fu, afraid to look up again from my reading and find in the window moonlight— but when I do, the fog is still there, and only the ancient poet’s hair has turned gray while a single…
Sometimes, now, I think of the back of his head as a physiognomy, blunt, rich with facial hair, the elegant stone-wall shapes of the skull like sensing features, as hard to read as surfaces of the earth. He was mysterious to me in his anterior depths, occiput, lambdoid, but known like a loved home outcrop…
My name in the black air, called out in the early morning. A premonition dreamed: waking, I beheld a future of mourning. Our partings were rehearsals for the final scene: you and I in a desert, saying goodbye on a white September morning. The call came. West, I flew west again. Impossible, but the sun…
“I’ll write a song about nothing at all . . .” —Guillaume IX of Aquataine (1071–1127) When I was young I fell in love with nothing. Nothing had my heart. I was a moody unpleasant youth; even my mother disliked me. What are you brooding about? she’d ask. Nothing I’d answer. For once, she…
I was sitting at a picnic table at one of the godforsaken places peeling an egg as if in this act I could recover what there was of gentleness and I was alone unless you counted the two forms of life, one sea and one land, that fought over the eggshells and stole pieces of…
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