Poetry

Back then, we had no personalities to interfere with what we were: two sisters, two brothers. Maybe our parents really were people who walked in the world, were mean or kind, but you'd have to prove it to us. They were the keepers of money, the signers of report cards, the drivers of cars. We…

Choked sunset Of crashing time. Roads. Roads. Intersections of flight. Cart tracks across fields That saw the burned sky Through the eyes Of dead horses. Nights with lungs full of smoke, With the heavy breath of those fleeing, When shots Struck the twilight. Out of a broken gate Ash and wind came soundlessly, A fire…

after K. L. Kahlbaum's Catatonia, 1874 Forgive my mild trismus. You hear that steak barking? Dog, dog, dog, dog. . . Do not give the doctor your hand. Leech on God's temple. Bid him goodbye. The picture—with the blond locks—no, not blond, the picture of the bare tree. It must remain the trare bee Light…

This damn ranting about doom . . . is that food for modern mind?“ —from Bergman's The Seventh Seal The Swedes look good in black and white because they're so fair, so blond. On film, the knight Antonius's skin shines as though there's a lamp inside his body. Even when they've come down with the…

to my son When the white flame of verses Dances above the urns at noon, Remember, my son. Remember those Who once planted their conversations like trees. The garden is dead, my breath is heavy, Preserve the hours, here Theophrastus walked Fertilizing the soil with oak bark, Binding the wounded bark to tree trunks. An…

Besides cultivating earth and memory, it’s necessary to cultivate emptiness: the promised hollow of faces, the partition of metaphors, the pathetic nicknames of god, every place where there ceased to be anything, every place where there will be nothing, thoughts that once were thought, thoughts that never were thought. And cautiously cultivating also the emptiness…

i My father knocked my mother up early in March, maybe it was late February. Had it been a leap year my conception might have been miraculous. But, no, it was the year of the Ram. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche had not yet died and my home, one of seven islands, was still a territory, not…

That from the seed of men No man, And from the seed of the olive tree No olive tree Shall grow, This must be measured With the yardstick of death. Those who live Beneath the earth In cement spheres, Their strength is A blade of grass Lashed by snow. The desert is history. Termites write…

for Jean Paul Neveu We don’t have a language for endings, for the collapse of love, for the intense labyrinths of dying, for the silenced scandal of irrevocable cave-ins. How can we say to the one who abandons us or to the one we abandon that to add another absence to absence is to drown…