Translated by Carolyn Forché This is the sign for “human”and this is the sign for “god.”This is the thought that life actuallylies outside the one who lives it—yes,that life would continue even if we did notdo so, as if it werea large tenement where some movein and others move out. I’m walkingthrough the rooms on…
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 dayyou see the Milky Way as the downy drink of morning. You’re ever aware of the sharedterror of the shy kids souring the airin the classroom. The globe spins dailyas you climb out of your…
For Christian You know it hadn’t a drop to do with loveexcept that if I showed you howsalt boiled on each winding stairback into that Baudelaireancellar eaved in velvet,your ear might love mine more for it. Surely I’d gone partly madbut can it have been madness if it yieldeda sound like a fruit spasming its…
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. We move like porpoises, undulate in air,…
six meters away from a charnel bikeyou 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 towersof people living out a dreamers’ ending of others’ displacement, where smoke would hittheir new build windows that…
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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