Poetry

Haydn conducting the first performance of the Farewell Symphony for Count Esterhazy in his palace, the work composed so that here and there an instrument would cease, each bewigged and bespectacled musician pack up his case and depart, the rich sounds in that great hall, with its plaster curlicues and cherubs and six-foot candelabra, diminishing…

You came to me first as dawn hauled up on ropes of apricot above the blackened wall of white pine. You came from the south, from the highest places, came down from the mountain running. You were announced by the crows, the shrill calls of alarm from the uppermost branches. You opened your throats in…

“I’ve decided the only thing that really interests me is how the sun hits a white wall.” —Edward Hopper to Andrew Wyeth   Somehow the crow snuck in, its caws echo             in the fluorescence of the hallways. We are all waiting at the ICU ward             for your suffering to come to an end….

Miguel told me he had been home alone for two hours, studying. It was in Guanajuato when he was twelve years old, on the Day of the Dead, and his mother and sisters had gone to tidy his father and grandparents’ graves. He didn’t remember why he looked from his book on the dining room…

is right, the pear is always askew at the brink, always in danger of falling straight out of the world of sphere toward the floor we don’t often see, that might be painted a rosy brown or gray green and still tilt into the landscape that needs brushstrokes to complete it, to fill in—but he…

Photo of Beckett on the fridge. He and I, smoke. All three of us are humming. A gust twitches the plastic wedge covering the kitchen window. I see a neighbor at tai chi, posing like Giacometti’s tree. Latched to his hand, Sam’s cigarette is a sixth digit. From down the block we hear a child’s…

for James Carroll       The freeway shudders under heavy trailers, and layers of accumulating afternoon heat.     A cormorant perches atop an inlet piling, the creosote log, driven into the silt, swaying     in a trace of tide. Desolate gravel raked around the storage farms, the winter-fuel stockpile.     Then, monumentally squat, the natural…

I keep remembering how he said You couldn’t bite into one without staining the meat. Egret ice lily egg bone-china white, only wounded, streaked by the skin’s rich red. Heraclitus, Heisenberg, a boy up a tree on a farm. And how they proved uncommercial. No good for butter, no good for pies. You had to…

Nothing whole is so bold, we sense. Nothing not cracked is so exact and of a piece. He’s the distempered emperor of parts, the king of patch, the master of pastiche, who so hashes other birds’ laments, so minces their capriccios that the dazzle of dispatch displaces the originals. As though brio really does beat…