Poetry

34. How could desire outrun satisfaction? Who is constantly solicited, never satisfied, driven, forced to it, forced to instruct: an albatross at his neck, provocative bird, for aimless years above his conquering ship, on motionless wings, before it lit—or would have lit—on Ramirez Island where it had taken off. An albatross mates for life and…

Leaves came and went as men warred over the shape of the table— peace would be talked in Paris, where Ho Chi Minh had been young once, hungry and hunted. Veteran of another war, my father wanted no squabbles at the supper table. What shape should it take to insure that we were out of…

i. Always the quality of mercy lies beyond us. ii. Somewhere I made mistakes but the light pitches my shadow against my eye as softly as cattail velvet might pacify a cheek. I can’t get tired of this steep and huge afternoon through which my error climbs looking for a weight with which to be…

You’ll find him listed under King, as in— Kong, brought back in chains,                         Kong on tour with Ringling Bros. see also: colossal metaphor, projected fear, reading Marcus Garvey and Du Bois. Photos on the wall: the early years— Kong in love, that boyish thatch of hair,                         Kong awry, gone off with our young…

An agony afoot, I burst into peacocks. Reverdy, all afternoon. Nothing is easy. It’s all broken nothing, ambiguous cold. In one poem a horse jumps over a hedge of sparks. The horseman is blue. And a bone or a flower is clouded with silence, everything engulfed in the peripheral. Somehow this produces in me pain,…

He opens the scullery door, and a sudden rush of wind, as raw as raw, brushes past him as he himself will brush past the stacks of straw that stood in earlier for Crow or Comanche tepees hung with scalps but tonight past muster, row upon row, for the foothills of the Alps. He opens…

The sum of things is the least of things. The dwarf loved the sovereign’s daughter repeatedly: at first, every morning, then he added on noon, then the army honed in like a giant umbrella. She was carried away like a dark subject until all that she felt and could not say hung like a nightworld…

There’s another man on my block who can’t sleep, I’m an admirer of his insomnia, it’s a tool like a glass of water is to thirst. In his case something like music is made, I know because my insomnia stalks his. Our street is lined with maples and has no streetlight and all the dogs…

The stars are filtering through a tree outside in the moon’s silent era. Reality is moving layer over layer like crystal spheres now called laws. The future is right behind your head; just over all horizons is the past. The soul sits looking at its offer.