“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….
Black drape like a solid shadow, as if the shade won’t slide from her. Veil, abstracted hair lifting on the breeze. Around us heels, furs, and scarves like swatches of Las Vegas, a twitch of liner on a pair of eyes, men in the cut of coats, the usual, long-faced inspection…
The phones, the long-distance phones are ringing. The satellite phone from the field camp in Kosovo. The lawyer’s phone in a complex in Palo Alto. The car phone conveying a child to baseball practice. In this way the siblings converse and condole much as the now-vanished Carolina parakeets with their sunflower-yellow heads and radiant green…
Cosmologists, epic poets, holy men in exile— They all found their way to the illustrious library. All lovers of knowledge were welcome to a niche In that bristling hush, no matter how shaggy or ragged. There were the usual cynics and the inevitable stoics. Some were sages without honor, scrawling out summas In their mongrel…
Little Kaiser, the parrot in our local headshop’s sidewalk cage, confronts an unceasing daily stream of whistles and coos and hellos, waspish buzz of film on auto-wind, the sudden, minor lightning of a flash. He doesn’t seem to mind. Not a headshop exactly: years ago the police swept away the ranks of bongs and rolling…
When you stood up and walked past the rows of desks and windows, seeing the yellow and green trees you had already admired, praising even the door where you stood before entering, imagining yourself reading passages of sin or love or the earth or moon’s ashen birth— what amazement you must have felt later, looking…
What had been hovering in the air all evening, there, as near as the other side of the table— No, not a woman, but so like a woman, turning away and smiling privately. More like a man—a group of men— who have found a way to draw the party to them. Meanwhile I sit combing…
No products in the cart.