The walking on alone of it, stooping (I could say I was picking flowers) the birthday near Easter when the word, girl, seemed foolish, the resistance to make the past read like Rilke when it read like KRAZY KOMICS, the adoration of Rembrandt despite the vogue away from Rembrandt, the feeling of kinship…
The May morning I came to where I was not expected. The May morning hazy with the mad swirl of maple seeds, where you stood blocking the door. “Where is Mom?” My voice lifted innocent as a child’s balloon. My face needy and vacant, the face you’d loved, or someone had…
Clear out here you don’t hear screams, shots, chants of mobs raging, ambulances or fire sirens; maybe some rabbit a fox caught, some young bird squirming in a cat’s jaws or the clenched claws of an owl. Otherwise, the outstretched countryside lies still. Until here in my bedroom’s wall- absorbing darkness,…
One moment, the mountain is clear in strong morning sunlight. The next, vanished in fog. I return to Tu Fu, afraid to look up again from my reading and find in the window moonlight— but when I do, the fog is still there, and only the ancient poet’s hair has turned gray while a single…
Sometimes, now, I think of the back of his head as a physiognomy, blunt, rich with facial hair, the elegant stone-wall shapes of the skull like sensing features, as hard to read as surfaces of the earth. He was mysterious to me in his anterior depths, occiput, lambdoid, but known like a loved home outcrop…
My name in the black air, called out in the early morning. A premonition dreamed: waking, I beheld a future of mourning. Our partings were rehearsals for the final scene: you and I in a desert, saying goodbye on a white September morning. The call came. West, I flew west again. Impossible, but the sun…
And who could play it well enough If deaf and dumb and blind with love? —Yeats Let’s not pretend we could be less complicated than millions before us. Let’s be just friends, be Platonic, only look at the bottoms of each other’s feet, or skin on inner forearms, where the sun has done almost no…
Nights turn a hairpin curve to dreams: I need to find our child a country or a name. I forget which. Jung remembered the smell of milk from his high chair, Woolf, red and purple flowers sprawled on her mother’s dress. A nun’s pink nose swoops towards me like a bird in my first recall….
1. That the wandering would be the more-favored part, this was unexpected, exceptional. Even the gnaw of the harness, faces shawled against the dust, nights without fire—sweet to him now— even this. Who could find that point again, at the canvas steppes where exhaustion forced them on into the serrated mouths of grass rather than…
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