You claimed as the one worth of your regrettable childhood the knowledge you'd gained to make another's childhood exemplary. You felt yourself quite able to withhold any emotion except love. You were a rod, your son's rod, your practiced calm his confidence, solace, and security. From books you learned carrot and stick, the four-year-old's embracing…
Death of a Travel Writer, of which this contribution forms a part, is an extended sequence of poems purporting to come from a deceased travel writer. The poems are part biography, part diary, part dream of fantasy. The finished sequence will have about twenty or so separate parts—which may or may not remain numbered—but the…
Acrylic resin paint on canvas No longer tension, no dimension, only the words without letters floating in their washes, hiding Salomé, the figure behind our musings trapped in her camouflaging dance. The limit makes the shape and we have none, no bodies for the indistinct yearnings ebbing into mist, desire and mist. Imagine the sea…
Every day the boy marks her progress: at the round window, her round eye, the bluebird that scrambled in and out with grass, or moss, with string, hair, wool, the innermost feathers of her breast. And if he's spotted her in the bush or on the wing, he lifts away the front wall of the…
What I dare to hope may be my next book will—Muses and publishers willing—consist of four longish poems, each focussed on a woman and each involving a relationship with (no, not her, but) a prior text. Something after a seventy-year-old friend had told me the story of her dramatic escape from war-torn Poland, I was…
Oil on paper mounted on linen Never this scratched world, its human brows like dry point, your harmonies are liquid glycerin, soothing, the lingering bath. Who knew better than you, Mark Rothko: color has not root nor core. Into each other at the first kiss fusing, a metamorphosis! Blue paint laps about our toes, our…
He was to arrive at San Francisco, a six-year-old boy flying from China alone for twenty hours. We went there to meet him, hoping he still remembered us, since he had not seen us for three years. We waited patiently at the airport, till all passengers came through the customs. Did he miss the plane?…
My earlier collections of verse were invariably divided into sec- tions—into sequences, that is—where geography or subject matter gave a unity to each section and a title set it off against its neighbours. The whole effect, or so I hoped, would add up to one of variety within unity, the unity proceeding from tone and…
Acrylic resin paint (Magna) on canvas The eye is watching you, the evil eye red-rimmed as the lipsticked lips of Thirties starlets sucks you in, in, in the quicksand path to sleep, lost Dante touring the circles. You have discovered the first “black hole.” Hesitating, hovering, you cannot decide: to enter the gravity of the…
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