Poetry

    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.

Summation: It was deliberate. We had to burn our barn, let our harvest go. Precipitations: Mama lost the baby, Father did not come back from town. The chestnuts failed again. We were distressed. Particularly lost. At winter’s eager edge. The Process: We bemused ourselves. Considerations: We could not: leave Mama alone with her cavernous dry…

translated by Jonathan Galassi Choked with white and black roots, cut by the waters, the earth smells of ferment and worms. Sorrow of things I don’t know is born in me: one death is not enough if time and again now the sod weighs its grass on my heart.