Untitled
Rooms I (I will not say worked in) once heard in. Words my mouth heard, then — be with me. Rooms, you open onto one another in the mind: still house this life, be in me when I leave, don't take from me what took so long.
Poetry
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Prose Song
Somebody medieval—the celebrated Anonymous of Bologna maybe—said that implicit in such an equation as 5=5 is the equality or equivalence (I for one get those two well mixed up) of all things fivefold, such that cinquefoil or quinquereme, let us say, can stand equally for a hand or a classic hand of stud or draw…
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Rain
When rain falls the crows shut their eyes and colors fade. They open them again in the darkness of their own wings. I stand at an intersection and let the headlights graze across my face. Leaves sink into sidewalks. Stores close, flags come down, but a warm wind rises through the grates. I want it…
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Begin Here
O onion, o open, o equal-eyed quail egg with swell yellow lake. O dove and small love effaced by a late disbelieving. O even and anti some ever come sun fall, red gloves and the rest on a day, on a divan, a sofa, a longue bit of chaise flecked with lint speckled blue (only…
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Clock Appraisal
The gear gold inside the golden-case clicks A hidden hour equal-to (an inch Of snow—between two hands, quartz-like—falls) equal-to The hour seen: jeweled-movement, minute-gear, in glass The main-spring winds the hour in the eye. One hour, measured twice: less equal seems The snow untracked to the foot-trod snow. I know. I know I know. I…
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To Come True a Thing Must Come Second
Once was a story of following following. Return is rarely the reverse I value or so I led you like a zero out the zoo, toured it twice at once from your regard, and came to understand. Roughing it, a captive is another whom a captive asks, which one of us stays wilder. We watch…
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At Large
His anguish was the squeeze of strangers ravaging his language, English, his anger, strangled, snapped him free at twenty-one to choose a certain simmering neighborhood in the city for revenge, carnage, and split the scene with a new name, gunman, lavished on him by newsmen as he crossed state lines, tuning in. A small boy’s…
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This I Call Home
Terrace Storms are inconsequential. A terrace always reverts, loyal subject, to the sun. Hallway A tunnel of betweenness. Here anything can bed anything. Back Fence I only wish it were higher. Don’t watch me. Front Porch Goddamn Astroturf, who’s it trying to fool? The one lone step, a mendicant slab— ungenerous to a fault, fatal…
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The Unbosoming
I have been a day boarder, Lord. I have preferred the table to the Bed. I have proffered, Lord, and I have profited, Lord, but little, but not. I was Bored, Lord, I was heavy, Lord. Heavy bored. Hopeless, Lord, hideous, Lord. Sexless. I was in love, Lord, but not with You….