I I couldn’t make out the minuscule handwriting In the notebook the size of his palm and crinkled Like an origami quim by shell-blast that stopped His pocket watch at death. I couldn’t read the poem. II From where he lay he could hear the skylark’s Skyward exultation, a chaffinch to his left Fidgeting among…
Thrift built us a shed out back in which to stow our set. I see a sky. A cloud with a carpenter’s hand in it. I know that shed. An all-day affair with particle board and steel hinges. All of us standing at attention, feeling— my family and I— (and I was youngest, and…
“. . . most desires end up in stinking ponds . . .” —Auden The water, if you can call it that, is black as tar, and the lily pads are seared at the edges, curling up as if trying not to touch it more than they have to. The lilies themselves have gone to…
Consider history as a cloud or the spread of roots Where nothing is consecutive Except at the moment of singularity, as in when one Walks into the day’s weather, The wind tearing the loose branches, power Lines dipping, and perhaps this is all we could Consider with any validity, for to go beyond this Is…
As in an illuminated page, whose busy edges have taken over. As in: jasmine starred onto the vine-dense walls, stands of phlox, and oranges, the flesh of each chilled turgid. By herself the sleepwalking girl arranged them: the paper airplanes now wrecked on the vines, sodden, crumpled into blooms which are mistaken all morning for…
Tell me a score I should meet at the back of my hair, up there to the left come surprise, scooped from a melon of everything like a moon of toothsome water. Must I grieve to the hoe’s chud chud (for seed I am would not be spat out ever)? Oh, shut up, you had…
without sleep without history the first thing without sound without memory of sound Pain thinks of origin’s trespass hoof and cochlea earth without blossom without axis or column the Yangtze without passage the sea without apparition and the animals let loose at Peloponnesus Pain thinks of the first thing without temple water black as burial’s…
There was a prairie of crushed flowers, A prairie that swelled and expired, A prairie of like-it-or-not. Oh but we found it, all of a sudden And straight down below. It was like a mountain as seen from the sky, Like all that sinks and disappears. We wanted to repeat what never happened Or sing…
“I’ll write a song about nothing at all . . .” —Guillaume IX of Aquataine (1071–1127) When I was young I fell in love with nothing. Nothing had my heart. I was a moody unpleasant youth; even my mother disliked me. What are you brooding about? she’d ask. Nothing I’d answer. For once, she…
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