Poetry

Pleasure is the widow, circulating. She walks and her dress unfolds like a stream folds in clear seams. The bright willow streams down the bank. Where she walks the stream flashes bright windows, a creed of windows. She weeps through the river and the changing flower of foam. Pleasure is the widow. So some pleasure…

The bloom was off the economic recovery. “I just want to know one thing,” she said. What was that one thing? He’ll never know, Because at just that moment he heard the sound Of broken glass in the bathroom, and when he got there, It was dark. His hand went to the wall But the…

   Ethna and I were eating scones and sipping espresso at the Café Arabica when I learned of my love affair with you. Everyone has been talking about it, though it came as news to me. Good news. I had no trouble believing every word of it.    True, I have no idea what you…

Hovering in the air were two luminous shapes. They turned, balanced in a pose of surrender. Water poured out into the lower world, through channels unsolved by busy rats, tides, and fish. Then a phrase of music is misheard, and the green Orpheus descends, striking the prison bars of the sky like a lyre as…

His first infidelity was a mistake, but not as big As her false pregnancy. Later, the boy found out He was born three months earlier than the date On his birth certificate, which had turned into A marriage license in his hands. Had he been trapped In a net, like a moth mistaken for a…

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…