Poetry

There’s no such thing as a rich sex life. Sex is poor. But sex isn’t the only thing That’s poor. Black-eyed Susans and purple loosestrife For instance haven’t got a prayer. The ring She wears causes a certain Platonic sting Like bonsai trees, which make me claustrophobic. Seeing her without it could make the angels…

Challenged in the marketplace About the flagrant masturbation The philosopher said he was sorry He could not assuage his hunger as easily. This philosopher of the marketplace Once famously appeared With a lamp in the broad daylight In search of one honest man. It was always the marketplace Where of course he had nothing to…

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…