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for John Engman (1949–1996) Dear friend, I heard tonight by phone of that ghost bubble in your brain. It was not the pearl of balance one fits between lines in a carpenter’s level to make something plumb, but a blip in a membrane that burst so now your fine brain is dead— that city…
War’s hell begins with a parade, high-stepping girls, the flag’s harem, Old Glory on its leash. In a corner of the flag is a token bit of night. We round up the stars, same as the boys. A blood-red flag— blood-blue, blood-white. Reality’s standard must never touch earth. Lining the streets, cheering, we forget how…
“Thy absence overflows the rose” —Hart Crane Because from the humid bed of August the afternoon held its blue arm out to me, I stood on a hill in Garretsville, Ohio at the headstone for Hart Crane— one shared by Clarence Crane, his father. As clouds removed all color from the sky, their shadows clarified…
After I’d filled the crystal vase with water, I thought of your ancient mother, who came once like a witch from a fairy tale to curse our uncertain union, how she stood at my sink and lectured on cutting stems at a slant under water so the blooms would last— this after weeks of…
On Slaughter Beach I lay me down on the sand between surf and calliope, there where oceania meets glitz: plastic mosques and minarets and transvestals, sub- verts, countersexuals—Spanky Sparklenuts, Afterbirth Boy and Crab Apple, Candace the Grimace and She-Who-Eats-Only-Fish. Nighttime it was, brine-sour, my head sunk in shadow. Above, boardwalkers walked—catcalls and titters. Such was…
Not here, where the birds pound their beaks on the rail and the blue jay feeds before the sparrow and a dried pot of mums holds a frozen pink flower, no, not here but elsewhere. Not here, where the grass no longer wonders or cares if the wind beheads a sunflower under the terror of…
Sometimes I have to squint to see clear and used to think this a fault of light— God’s failure to beam the intended world bright enough on the brain pan. Now I know it’s age, my own worn optical works that blur leaves to smudge. Justice wears a blindfold, and the firing squad captive…
My good friend who these days despises the newspapers Complains this isn’t news but gossip, a talking down, In brief sidebars, in the mathematics of The intellect, from the highest To the lowest common denominator, The front pages with their treaties signed and breached In an afternoon, the borders Fixing and unfixing themselves Like…
I sighed this morning, a slow deep inspiration that dragged the air into the recesses of my lungs, portions I imagine had been forgotten in the last few months. And then for a second or two I felt the life pass out of me. As if it were a prelude, a taste for the sake…
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