Poetry

Gored by the climacteric of his want He stalls above me like an elephant. —Robert Lowell Stalls? I’d have wondered, Has he died at last? Like Anthony’s self-pity: I am dying, Egypt, dying. Like Nelson Rockefeller undoing Happy on his hooker. Like a stuck pig who hasn’t seen the dripping knife, Kemal Pasha’s grunting, grunting,…

Had it worked well even once? Can one point to a golden age of good times? Whatever the case, the arms decided at last to separate themselves. They were not like the others; they had their own tastes and ambitions: pleasures the others could never appreciate. The legs went next, alleging a life of agony…

He will tell you how each day wears the impress of childhood fields, where he was made to kneel and harvest darkness, then extract its most pure element, which his father used on his mother with rags, like chloroform. This is the most you will get. He has no notch or opening primed for release,…

1. For five days in October, Carlos died. He could get himself up, up to the last. I’m fine, he said, so I left him alone. I went shopping, but then, when I got home, He was dead, stiff, dressed in the three-piece suit We’d bought at Penney’s for his laying-out, And lying curled like…

Like a dream, which when one becomes conscious of it becomes a confusion, so her name slipped between the vacancies. As little more than a child I hurried among a phalanx of rowdy boys across a dance floor— such a clattering of black shoes. Before us sat a row of girls in pastel dresses waiting….

“That was in another life,” we say. Everyone knows what that means— another love, in another country. “In another life, when I drank chartreuse, densely herbal, fresh green on my tongue, the light filtering through new rainwater fell on a face, beside a café window. . . .” I hear about another’s other life which…

Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona,     mi prese del constui piacer sì forte,     che, come vedi, ancor non m’abbandona. Amor condusse noi ad una morte. —Dante Is this hell, where neighbors will try to burn us out? To clear the woods one doused a cat in gasoline And let her run afire through…

It’s not a fancy restaurant, nor is it a dump and it’s packed this Saturday night when suddenly a man leaps onto his tabletop, whips out his prick and begins sawing at it with a butter knife. I can’t stand it anymore! he shouts. The waiters grab him before he draws blood and hustle him…

She reclines, more or less. Try that posture, it’s hardly languor. Her right arm sharp angles. With her left she conceals her ambush. Shoes but not stockings, how sinister. The flower behind her ear is naturally not real, of a piece with the sofa’s drapery. The windows (if any) are shut. This is indoor sin….