Poetry

Sheffield Pastorals has no plot—only the interweaving of a number of themes. Each section is a cluster of self-contained, slightly discon- nected lines, in the manner of a ghazal, but unlike the ghazal all the lines of the section focus on a common subject. I don't know how many sections the poem will finally have….

1 I looked out over Mexico City's notorious skyless skies, and I looked further and the distances contracted to a fist. Diverging currents of traffic; skies without ocher and ultramarine. Over the jagged faded silhouette of the city; propane tanks perch like pigs at a trough on the rooftops. Five years ago the earthquake, five…

     The two books I think I am cooking up are:      1. Thingsomeness. Orthodox verse (villanelles, etc.) plus            some less orthodox experiments in sound repetition (e.g.,            borzoi and for joy, echo and threshold).      2. Brass and Percussion: Pros Songs. Derived somewhat            frmo classical Greek (“logaedic”) and Chinese fu models            (Pound includes the…

My pale inner left arm pierced, and withdrawn; the sweat-heated pillow flattened under my neck;      I lay and fingered my mental parts. A draft stirred the red curtain: a figure at the foot of the bed, observing like a brother.      Not much trace of him, before our trouble. . . But I needed nothing there….

Without shadow there is no form. —Laura Gilpin What if Shadow should ever leave you? Then you would have no cover, no completion. Naked, you would have no darkness In which to renew your lost pride. Shadow follows for safe voyages. When Shadow speaks, revelation Echoes from watchful, hidden silence. Shadow is darkness caressing light….

My friend and I compare love-at-first-sights, seeing whose got there truly first because sight did it to them. I say it's only language. Without those words, that same order, no love that magnets onto the lover through just walking into a room and looking. All through our teens, getting ready for eyeball-to- eyeball link-ups, so…

This dictionary here calls scorpions “the first land animals,” coming forth after the largo collapsing of the Ordovician, etc., however I wonder how it knows, I mean you know, how? when into the vacuum created by my imbecile sublime curiousness comes something atavistic: along the right flank of Lawrence of Arabia on TV, a build-up…

I left the road where a stile entered the wood. Branches in their shadow everywhere, the trees standing close in their own flour. Face to face with a mouse body on a patch of bark—the shape small, the wings flat—inverted and staring. Meant to be half seen, quick in the last light: little leather angel…

As if some child, unwilling to shut even the figurative heart into pocket or lunch pail had carried it plate-like home in a downpour. It was a passionate migration—no matter its redundant shape and thirty others just as crude. The passage did it good, white lace bleeding, the stock message smudged out of language by…