Poetry

The light that woke the mayor made him think of town. It was a pale pink light ticked out by a palpitating bulb that droned above the empty road he lived on. He sat upright in bed, noticed his posture, how his jutting head sought equilibrium and not much else. God was far off. And,…

Peacock, I have to tell you, your feathers are beautiful. Snake, your length is my life. Mighty elephant, I never forget the corner I came from. Your shell, long-living turtle, is my crown. I preach the laugh of the hyena. Dear horse, thank you for my head of hair. Thank you, sweet ox, for the…

The sun came to in late December. Spring seemed just the thing that flattered into bloom the murdered shrubs along the splintered fence. The awnings sagged with puddles. Roads were streams. Wet leaves in sheets streaked everything with rust. The man who raked his lawn transferred a toad too small to be a toad back…

“I will smash their guitar.” —Joan Miró   The force that drives the left-handed guitarist     Waking from a dream that again escapes me to play right-handed . . . immortality, frets     like the eyes of vermin. No sheep fold, no birth chords and stops, scorings, the music itself     lava, breasts, no color…

—a translation of Dante Alighieri’s Purgatorio, Canto XVII Remember, reader, if ever high in     the mountains the fog caught you, so you could see     only as moles do, looking through their skin how when the humid, dense vapors begin     to grow thinner the sphere of the sun     finds its way feebly…

Spring rain. Inklings, earthlings, wet present     The sequence of events, that’s what’s best, when the clots participles and shivers before red sun and cicadas     dissolve as from the drugs . . . or in your city, Santoria, snow cones, dubbed syllables     to hear the names, to have the characters cast down The…

for Osip Mandelstam   For us, all that’s left is a dried bee, tilted onto one wing. Not long ago, a bloom fastened its tongue, while its belly tried unsuccessfully to tip it backwards. We mustn’t touch— anything without water is without give. This bee is our scout— one day, dust will pronounce itself in…

A drunk man reels his tractor around the square lawn, midnight. His wife stares from the front door window as if on a half-sunk ship’s deck at a shark tearing through the dark water. She chews her thumbnail raw. Two of their sons, in blue pajamas, shuffle across the linoleum rubbing their eyes. She plays…

From a rain-stained square tunneled into the rough-shingled roof, the skylight begins, in small creaks, to complain. I crane, look straight up at the bottoms of two black feet— three prongs and inches, each; between them dips the hammock of a full-bellied crow, round and big as the cauldron he belongs in. From below, I…