Poetry

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…

New York, January. I am in the act of reaching out a hand to put a letter in the mailbox. The letter is a request to an old acquaintance (old now, perhaps; he certainly seemed old to me twenty years ago) for advice about a book I am contemplating, a gathering of recollections about my…

In the duplication center I xerox a hundred pages of the usual stuff, you know the stuff. I xerox maybe a branch's worth, maybe a small lower branch of Georgia loblolly pine: evergreen scent of toner, & when I close my eyes, I see the long needles of light along my branch. Sometimes, the stuff…

I Hazing, they call it in America, but I already knew it from Armagh, the fledgling hauled to the pump, protesting, by the bigger boys to be baptised with his nickname, Froggy, Screwy, Rubberneck or Dopey, some shameful blemish, his least attractive aspect, hauled out to harry, haunt him through his snail years in St….

I In the “restored medieval house—sensational views” we've rented for March and April, one of the first things I become aware of is a strange crowding jostling my sleep. Thick-walled interiors go weirdly garish, floodlit by a multiplicity of dreams, ungenerous dreams that cluster packed as hanging garments elbowed, shouldered through in a narrow, fetid…

I sit at McDonald's eating my fragment of forest. The snail and slug taste good, the leaves, the hint of termite and bat, the butterfly trans- substantiated by steer karma, and mine. Another pleasure: to breathe distillate of foam scented with coffee and chemical cream. Another virtue: groups of us all trained the same way,…

It takes me a lot longer to write a poem I like, for three reasons: First, although inevitably I will, I can't consciously bear to repeat myself, so when I find myself writing about a subject I've addressed before, I stop in my tracks till I find a new direction to go. This, of course,…

Before there was anything else, solitude filled space in the form of gas—lavender, thin, smelling like mouthwash. When solitude studied itself in school, it turned into a sphere the size of a ball bearing, unbreakable, yet soft as beans soaked to make soup. When it grew old, solitude sprouted leaves like the winter oak's. Dead,…