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…
An absolute sound, this soughing above the tops of trees. For the longest while I couldn’t look up, so much did I long to see the ocean, rough and whitened. Such soft ululations, such a drumroll of feathers! Yet it was no other weather than Wind. I looked up; the sky lay blue as always,…
Eighty-one degrees a record high for the day which is not my birthday but will do until the eleventh of June comes around and I know what I want: a wide-brimmed Panama hat with a tan hatband, a walk in the park and to share a shower with a zaftig beauty who lost her Bronx…
All bend in one wind.
—Achill Island, County Mayo, Ireland, June 2000 Last night the shadow of a cloud rolled off the bare mountain like a shawl slipping from the shoulder of a giant. Shirts on the clothesline sagged in rain. We burned turf, fists of earth blackening in the fireplace, room full of poets’ books leaning rumpled, half-asleep. All…
Along the strand stones, busted shells, wood scraps, bottle tops, dimpled and stainless beer cans. Something began here a century ago, a nameless disaster, perhaps a voyage to the lost continent where I was born. Now the cold winds of March dimple the gray, incoming waves. I kneel on the wet earth looking for a…
As if the names we use to name the uses of buildings x-ray our souls, war without end: Palace. Prison. Temple. School. Market. Theater. Brothel. Bank. War without end. Because to name is to possess the dreams of strangers, the temple is offended by, demands the abolition of brothel, now theater, now school; the school…
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