Poetry

Now it's raining again. Will it, luminous, ever take the place of freedom, passion in the capital? The raindrops need not formulate as prison bars— again. The absence of rain was an illusion first one, then the other settled for. It's easy to stay up all night in the music, drinking from the robber's cup—…

A sac of waters and saturated tendrils, The tear-thatch fills the cavity of the chest And presses against the brain stem, the pelvic cradle, The distended cage of ribs. It bobs Heavily, yet urges its rubbery weight around The heart in pliant folds that flex in rhythm With the still-avid laboring waves Of dilation and…

The glass of water between them did not bar, ban or challenge their fevered conversation. But soon the glass shape disappeared and the water became a serious ocean, a sexy flow and barren. This endless gap, pitch and drowning water sprays up these facts: he was just a boy and she a thriving woman; he…

Tourniquet tight, spade vein rising, I must have done it Three or four times before I realized it was me easing the needle Into my vein. My friends crouched, waiting for their turn, Our eyes fixed on the plunger slowly pressing down. It was as close as I'd ever felt to anyone, those moments We…

You catch my breath with your waking a calf moves closer to its mother (slumbering) some brother leaves his home to bring me what I need. It doesn't work & I call you back— Sugar—I call you Sugar no rest in my slumber no sugar in my bowl

Once we snuck in to look at it, late, after the choir director had gone, after Mrs. Wilson had changed her organ shoes, clapped them in her black bag and turned out the sanctuary lights. Then we crept back into the nave, dark swelling the high ribs, the carpet swallowing our footfall. Streetlight fell red…

Such accidents do happen dancing: she says I'm dancing beneath your loving blow so I stagger staggered, he says no: it wasn't a blow it was a brush—feather light; I fly round the world for your gold another time she tries so hard to make him well, it makes her sleepy. More lately they share…

from Ten Days in Russia Beneath you the road is smoke, the bridges thunder and everything is left far behind . . . Russia, where are you flying to? —Gogol, from Dead Souls You ancients out there, bulky, dark-coated women, you wait so patiently for a bus that never comes, as you must have waited…

At this point in the development of “When All the Walls Are Down,” the poem and I have brought each other as far as we can go. From now on, I suspect, revision will mainly involve aeration. Without it the poem would be, as my Eve says of Adam, “plunged into his talk's / spring-tide”…