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….
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…
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