Poetry

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”…

There's nothing more seductive than the basement of this gated and clapboard building in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, on a Sunday afternoon when Sister Walker's got the turkey wings and the fried chicken and the baked macaroni and the green beans and candied yams simmering on every burner in the tiny kitchen while upstairs all the brothers…

Obscenity stares at me mockingly Through dark American history Like an owl glaring out of An old shit-filled barn. I glare back at this glowing, Enigmatic image, and hear Henry Miller's voice laughing Out of his owlish disguise: “You can't fudge or fug it Instead of saying fuck. Words are like lonely buoys Floating in…