Poetry

Eighty-one degrees a record high for the day which is not my birthday but will do until the eleventh of June comes around and I know what I want: a wide-brimmed Panama hat with a tan hatband, a walk in the park and to share a shower with a zaftig beauty who lost her Bronx…

All bend in one wind.

—Achill Island, County Mayo, Ireland, June 2000 Last night the shadow of a cloud rolled off the bare mountain like a shawl slipping from the shoulder of a giant. Shirts on the clothesline sagged in rain. We burned turf, fists of earth blackening in the fireplace, room full of poets’ books leaning rumpled, half-asleep. All…

Along the strand stones, busted shells, wood scraps, bottle tops, dimpled and stainless beer cans. Something began here a century ago, a nameless disaster, perhaps a voyage to the lost continent where I was born. Now the cold winds of March dimple the gray, incoming waves. I kneel on the wet earth looking for a…

The infinitive is a conservation law. Not to mention all the other things Without which we would have been lost, Like the diamond engagement ring Or the parsimony of the rich. A different context is a different play. The girl in the coffee shop Was a woman onstage. Timor mortis conturbat me. Philadelphia left me…

It’s mad, but it just might work, he said, and floridly signed his name to The Great Submarine Race. Submarines slumbered in his bloodstream and submarines burbled in shallow slips. The Flying Electrons bore the news around the world on cold white drafts and the news pierced the blue clouds. A man in the square…

I stroll among wounded merchants’ daughters. What to buy? What to wear? The questions dreadless enough. I take them down from their posts. Heart cuff, woodpecker wing, suit-so-sorry. News of the repeating, damned repeating. Circles the sky. Once I tried crooning and fell apart simply. The girls in slit skirts made an art of revealing….

1. His camera absorbing the veld to expose its slow, tectonic motion, to let the inevitable gazelles graze the film as he rests easy, sleeping in emerging wheat . . . 2. Six years they coexisted in his case, symbiotic within silver slivers, as if forsaking faith in days to date in the negative. 3….

for J.L. Thanks for your fan letter—I’ve built a shrine. I was up all night thinking of you up all night studying my use of slant and internal rhyme in A Shoemaker’s Dystopia. By line 317 the scheme I fear is obvious, so I was giddy as salmon at spawn that you found my little…