Translated by Carolyn Forché This is the sign for “human” and this is the sign for “god.” This is the thought that life actually lies outside the one who lives it—yes, that life would continue even if we did not do so, as if it were a large tenement where some move in and…
Translated by Carolyn Forché The curtain moved gently, dawn spilled milk over the city. I never saw you again like that.
On the second day, light; on the third, water, then the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, etcetera, until you come to the lesson-centered day you see the Milky Way as the downy drink of morning. You’re ever aware of the shared terror of the shy kids souring the air in the classroom. The globe spins…
For Christian You know it hadn’t a drop to do with love except that if I showed you how salt boiled on each winding stair back into that Baudelairean cellar eaved in velvet, your ear might love mine more for it. Surely I’d gone partly mad but can it have been madness if…
From Look at This Blue Your palms know where to go. What they imagine leads you. Everything we muster moves us along, like water mirroring itself remembers where to flow, how to go there. In the dream you follow, in the dream we fly over all of this direness float….
six meters away from a charnel bike you lie with closed lids beneath maw of atmosphere, blessing a forest of gravel, helmet on and face up. three of the rubberneckers on 999 calls, and by your brown body, the towers of people living out a dreamers’ ending of others’ displacement, where smoke…
Growing up in the South is like kicking a mule to feel eternity in your bones. Or kicking a scarecrow, and calling it a mule.Or running your fingers over the rusted, abandoned blade from a tractor in its eternal rest, and calling that a mule. You’ll call anything a mule. Lace doilies on the dining room table, the white-suited mayor leaning…
we call them, that week at our rented beach shack,with smiles equally, let’s admit, tender and cruel.Heart, cancer, rope— they flourished without them. Designed tiny houses. Protested often.A month in Guatemala. Book clubs,movie groups, wine tasting before the play. More friends than either of us, solitary couple, could imagine.Some old myth unfurling, surely, before usas we haul their bright umbrellas down…
In the piles in the backyardhe and I sat in June’s pumped-up sun, half-blinded,sifting through rocks and crystals, winter’s lump and strandsprouting thin green leaves, lobes that would turnto vine and squash and yellow in fall’s sideways light.He grabbed fistfuls with clumsy fingers, smearing themon his mouth, wanting to be in it completely. Later, he’d…
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