Poetry

The front door’s latch slides into its brass socket, the kind of sound that pushes you off, like a flip turn at the pool, your thighs recoil and you’re out past the flags, well on your way . . . only I’m talking about the last lap, when there’s no next turn, the future is…

You’ve told me how they bury the dead in Ghana— how they lay each, finally, in the heart of his life: a twelve-foot wooden cocoa pod or onion for the farmer, chiefs in slick gold eagles two-men-tall, and crab, crayfish, lobster, sanded tuna coffins— because now that you have had me, oh fisherman, you would…

translated by George Evans and the author I love this body that’s lived through life, its amphora shape, its water smoothness, its streaming hair that crowns the skull, the delicate stem of its crystal face ascending exquisitely from shoulders and collarbones. I love my back sprayed with muted bright stars, my translucent hills, wellsprings of…

The first one was in Michigan and I loved him     like I was digging in a foreign land and he was         the ruin I came to discover. Michigan is as cold as people imagine and when I remember him now     he is leaned against one of those gaudy American         cars, big…

When you shut your eyes to daydream, you’re really imagining the face of God, who, in the fifties, assumed the face of Mrs. Oshkenozi, who sat in her apartment window handing glasses of tap water to boys in pursuit of perfect stickball. Grandpa & his compatriots puffed unfiltered Camels & flirted with imperfect hands of…

A noose of moonlight— I think I see what my father saw That night when he went out To the leaning barn— He followed the light, Scared up some rope in the tack room To toss over the beam.        The wind rending itself             through barbed fences. I found him The next morning, Kneeling…

Right now the men put aside     their composing sticks and settle by the hellbox     chatting in groups that never seem to vary     from day to day. Naturally I’m anxious to fit     in naturally, to be considered one amongst     metal men and composers. I hesitate on the edge of     the…

The bass we catch is too big with years, its dark stripes notched and wavering like a cut trunk’s rings. We drag it over the gunnel, stand back, and no one will touch it, at first. The children cry and want it gone. And when we do let it go, it is not out of…

“La poésie vit d’insomnie perpétuelle.” —Rene Char There’s a sickness in me. During the night I wake up & it’s brought a stain into my mouth, as if an ocean has risen & left back a stink on the rocks of my teeth. I stink. My mouth is ugly, human stink. A color like rust…