Poetry

The perfect ease of grain time enough to spill the flavor of a woman carried through the rain. Honey-talk tongues down home dreams a rushed but shapely prayer. Evening lips part to hush questions raised at dawn. The melon yields another slice. Fingers understand. Ecstasy becomes us all. Red cherries become jam. Deep juvenile sleep…

He returns her valentines with the misspellings underlined. Her life story read like a subpoena. Her pen leaks in his pocket. He wears the shirt for years. His life reads like an instruction manual. He wears red socks to her mother’s funeral. Her life story reads like a purchase order. She memorizes the work of…

    It’s been suggested: well kept lawns and fences, white porch swings and toast by the fire.     It’s been requested: puppies, a window of blossoming pear trees and a place for robins to nest. But I know that somewhere, out there the town is lit. The players begin to make music in all the…

Gyn’s packaged in pastel. I’m in the pink suite of X-Ray wrapped in baby blue (opens-in-the-front) behind a pink- flowered curtain, waiting for the pink- and-white-clad tech. The dressing room’s a cell smaller than solitary, papered pink. In the waiting room a fretful pink- with-fever baby settles at the breast of her mama. I reminisce:…

It was one of those things you just have to believe to see. Let’s call him, Kenneth— yes, Kenneth Oboto— sitting statue still, no, say: still as machete death— in a silk, leopard-skin tutu blouse and skullcap, Parade Magazine in hand— on a green-slatted Iowa City park bench, day-one, freshman orientation— like a beautiful, black-eyed…

Thief of the corn, patch of night against a perfect sky, I see you there watching me with your strange eyes.     What message do you bring me? When the leaves fall you’ll be all we have left. Perched above the cemetery walk, you add your two cents’ worth     when he reads the part…

translated by Jonathan Galassi Desire for your bright hands in the half-shadow of the flame: they smelled of oak and roses; and death. Ancient winter. The birds out foraging seed were suddenly snow; like our words. A little sun, an angel’s halo, then mist: and the trees, and us made of air in the morning.

To Spain, and not a single day of awe there. The Spanish swans lifting from the river: no ripples. To sit in a spring whose waters offer no prophecy. The not-expected. No one reading your mind. No stopping the light inside the beast from crumbling. Long ago, a fog came to settle on a low…

translated by Jonathan Galassi Ravager of lethargies and sorrows, night; safeguard against silences, the age of offhand sadnesses re-buds. And I see boys in me still slender-hipped, on the shells’ slope turn anxious at my changed voice.