Poetry

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…

Under the lamplight of a Paris hotel, You read Time on “The Decline of America” While your wife watches the evening news,      hoping for comprehension. You remember when you were very poor And made less money than you'll spend on this vacation. You vowed then not to romanticize that time, But your pockets stuffed with…

I must train myself to no longer exist but as a stone lifted and thrown to wherever I land, a new place, a new odor to it and new sound and action surrounding me, all this without the thought of loss, despair, or hope, a preparation for loss. Such a life would be god's, if…

Il grande tetto où picoraient des focs è un'immagine idillica del mare. Oggi la linea dell'orizzonte è scura e la proda ribolle come una pentola. Quando di qui passarono le grandi locomotive, Bellerofonte, Orione i loro nomi, tutte le forme erano liquescenti per sovrappiù di giovinezza e il vento più violento era ancora una carezza….