“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…
R.I.P., 9/1/20–10/11/97 A sad date, summer’s end. I rarely called but mailed the basket of chocolates you loved, and Mother monitored, Oh, Roy! You were greedy for so little. I’d send the few bad things you cared for: candy, a humidor, bitter, slender, black cigars. Years ago I roused then wouldn’t sleep with a boy…
The movie about the great Siberian rose, Brought back to life by the doctor who killed her, Was playing a block away at the Lane. The usher Was dressed like a nurse, and scowled, and told us Not to make noise. I wish we had For as soon as the movie began, a tomblike room…
Watermelon, not pomegranate, is the fruit of the dead. I eat it for breakfast these hot midsummer days to feel my spellbound mouth crunch the cool flesh, so many seeds to tease out with the tip of my tongue and spit onto my plate with a small clatter. The dead thirst for…
“The poem is a sort of animal.” —Ted Hughes I give him words to tell me who he is. He gives them back, begins a visual discourse on invisibility, gunning by me a film in snippets & jump-shots, starring him. Light flashes everywhere. But you can still make out frames that form a…
Lying in bed we feel soon We’ll do what’s right and end The wrong thing we’ve come to be, I to you, and you to me. Not all of us, as it turned out, Was wrong. Years one and two, For one . . . And perhaps remembering That time again, we turn to make…
Say a calling knocks you out of sleep, draws blood, is accessible only by water. Say you believe you own your life but you have looked away and your absence has already begun. You struggle out patched together by medication and makeup scaling the broken cadence, the frost-heaved lanes, walking papers clenched to your chest….
There are nights I dream of goldfish and in my dreams they sing to me in fluted, piercing sopranos like the Vienna Boys’ Choir. Although in the daylight they are mostly silent and ravenous— the suction-cup grip of their mouths on my fingertip like tiny rubber bath- room plungers when they rise to strike at…
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