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 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…
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