Poetry

A year after your death, I leaned above My desk, and listened to gullshrieks rising off The shoreline I imagined—shapes of driftwood, Glistening sacs of jellyfish, whatever Washes in—page after page of days Misplaced in the leaden interim . . .                                                           One evening, I felt it before I saw the seam, the tremor Widen—felt…

after Giorgio de Chirico 1. When I became metaphysical, the artist begged my forgiveness. A small sacrifice 2. to rid the palette of its noise. I have traveled far on the unlikely properties of still life, 3. and in my bleakest postures, I have glided on the prows of rowboats without dreaming; 4. so I…

In the line of trees part of the mirror grows a harder forest through them. A pallor is the storm. Blossoms through the trees, the mirror of rain, flow hard as a fever. We hear the marble water dressing, dressing. The middle of rain sours the skin. The mist is combed through, pulled apart, having…

A good man is seized by the police and spirited away. Months later someone brags that he shot him once through the back of the head with a Walther 7.65, and his life ended just there. Those who loved him go on searching the cafés in the Barrio Chino or the bars near the harbor….

I have been sculpting my father’s head. I began it when he died, when his head was most familiar, when the priest called him a liar. I have been sculpting my father’s eye. It had been wide and black, they say, peerless in the art of sinking; my father was a king. I have been…

The clothes are black and unstructured this fall,                           enlivened               here and there by what appears to be monastic chic: a crucifix of vaguely Eastern pro-                           venance,               a cowl. My friend, fresh out of drama school, explains to me how starkly medieval woolens                           were cut:               few seams, to spare unraveling,…

A monster has risen out of somewhere— its left foot clawed, gripping the earth; the most terrible things coming out of its giant mouth— fire, and at the same time poisonous black spears— for the monster is not of nature entirely.               In front of the monster is a figure in black that seems to…

What are the sounds that crowd the path And linger above the unmown field? Do you hear? —The winds of heaven are talking In the language of the heart. “June, June,” They say. “June. The lilacs are gone.” Wonderful things are weary of me: The groaning meteors on the August road; The pressed grasses where…

after “Farmhouse in Auvers with Two Figures” Talk about modern. The roof as flat as the sky, as the people. Forget Cézanne. Just look at this. And the shape of the roof: a fish, a car, a revolver. And the bushes like green fire, and the bush which seems to be growing out of the…