Poetry

My senses tired      and turning toward sleep, your shoulder sleeping      distinct in my hand. My thoughts disordered      and lapped in fur.

I kept going into that unlikely tavern even after it closed for drinking. Something about the beer-breath ache that haloed the memory of my dead father and the past-before-I-knew-him of my dead husband. But beyond this the chancy air that something in my future might be dislodged and pinballed by its very defunctness into fresh…

                 Like you I drive my ten thousand American miles a year burning fossil fuels (conversion            to a ton or two of carbon)            but maybe unlike you I peer into my rearview mirror imagining air      filled with insects & plants maybe                              Triassic dinosaurs                  turtles Devonian dragonflies…

Her heels tapped on the tiles and she knelt at the money-box in the candle-light beside me, at the Body with woman feet. A spear at her whisper pierced my side, her head bent, her meat sweet.

I am never home when he knocks his speculum against my breastbone. It would be fair to say I have developed an immunity against his furtive questionings and gougings. All our interviews are conducted through the keyhole which reduces or enlarges him to a button with a hyphen of thread linking two black nostrils. He…

In his “Heiligenstadt Testament” Beethoven— let me start over— Joseph Jefferson etched into his desk with a switchblade the legend WHY THE FUK AM I DOING HERE? then underlined it, then inked his question in with ballpoint blue and red. For the sake of his transcendent art, Beethoven hoped “to endure to the end.” Joe…

At a well beside the way I alighted and put down my lips to the water: You, lifting your face like a thirsty thing to mine. I think I know you well. Of character retiring, with eyes open inward, careful of your appearance; settled in your habits, restless in disposition, best left alone. What matter…

When within the impenetrable green this morning is (thicket, wicker basket), the better to hear shade in shadow, twigs and stabs of light, I shut my eyes: the mockingbird sings in threes, like Dante, ninety-eight rhymes in seventeen cantos; rocks throne to throne, imbibing; wrings out each note, scrubbing on the old washboard, lets the…

The shift from Eugenio Montale's first three books—high modernist poetry, lyrically intense, elaborately wrought, musically intricate, elliptical—to his last four (Satura, the two Diaries of 1971 and 1972, and the Quaderno di quattro anni) for the translator poses obvious problems, above all of tone and continuity. The late poetry, for instance, is no less dense…