Poetry

I was wearing green. Nineteen. Flat cheap light illuminates a male, twenty-one. A female virgin. Him, not. 1963. Let the light recede. Forget dark in a red Triumph, street after midnight, a girl out past the rules. Or another story: the man who lived near the lake. Peter, the lifeguard. Moon over desert. Grand movement…

March strikes the ice of the sky With its sharp pick. Light bursts through the cracks, Surges low Over the telegraph wires and empty roads. White at noon, it nestles in the reeds, A huge bird. When it spreads its claws, The webs shine in the thin mist. Darkness comes fast. Then the sky arches…

1. . . .the architect throwing his hands into the fire, the faint inscription on the tongue the invisible one, without wings, without shoes, calling out, slowing almost to a halt summaries of dust recalled in redemption, music reconstructed ceaselessly the garden full of light, a choir in itself the fleck of green in a…

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…