Poetry

after Joao Cabral de Melo Neto To go to it often, to catch its level impersonal voice, says de Melo Neto in the graveyard’s moon-white orchards. To being hammered, the lesson in poetics, the speller of spells, he says. What did you learn standing with the east wind cutting over the fields of tilting stone,…

Because God wants us to have indefinite life, like Him, Richard Seed intends to electroshock an egg to implant his image and likeness into Gloria, his wife             (to implant into Gloria, his menopausal wife, his                      shocked image and likeness) after inducing quiescence in its nucleus (moon-pause) so his DNA might nest there and…

for Gabriella There had been a cricket in the basement when I dreamt you were an unopened envelope on my chest. I heard on the radio how silverware suddenly tarnishes in a drawer before disaster, tornadoes, sudden changes in weather. The voice on the radio, on the lookout, she said, “It’s beautiful . . ….

At night you wake, not to seek me but to come to your self, a small song— here is your hand on the wall in the squares the porchlight makes. You are the day’s hard rain. It becomes you (and all the clouds in the pond). Tonight the fox is struck, the steeple reaches up…

i am a man’s head hunched in the road. i was chosen to speak by the members of my body. the arm as it pulled away pointed toward me, the hand opened once and was gone. why and why and why should I call a white man brother? who is the human in this place,…

for René Touzet Is music, then, a balcony from which a shuffling of passings is surmised, or is it mortar and archway, or must it be inkling, maestro, a suspicion of survivals? We sit in rows to watch ourselves listen to your danzas and contradanzas, the Cubanized European genres which define a certain buoyancy in…

According to her housemate, she is out with Bob tonight, and when she’s out with Bob you never know when she’ll get in. Bob is an English professor. Bob used to be in a motorcycle gang, or something, or maybe Bob rides a motorcycle now. How radical of you, Bob— I wish I could ride…

In the closet the dress lives, a deep white in its vinyl bag, eternal, the empire waist so stylish before her time and after, its crêpe ivoried, tartared like a tooth, feeding on what leaks through the zipper’s fervent mesh, an unmentionable, unworn, waiting, immortally in mind. Open a window, please, I’m feeling faint. On…

For his sake drifting away from the true windlessness, torn sails the aftermath of him: white canvas suffering too vaguely from the beautiful agreeing with these arguments, but far away: sought him, found him not, distant from image, archetype, the typical sublime’s encroachments, archaeology of his innocence which is to be destroyed. Shaped, shaping, shapes,…