His beak could open a bottle, and his eyes—when he lifts their soft lids— go on reading something just beyond your shoulder— Blake, maybe, or the Book of Revelation. Never mind that he eats only the black-smocked crickets, and dragonflies if they happen to be out…
He didn't really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself. —Julian Barnes Is there anyone but must repress a secret thrill, on arriving in Venice for the first time and stepping into a Venetian gondola? That singular conveyance, come down unchanged from ballad…
Say I chew desire and water is an explosion of sugar wings in my mouth. Say it tastes of you. Say I could drown because you left for the time it takes a blackbird to understand a pine tree. Say we enter the pine woods at dawn. We never slept and the only opium we…
For Dennis Brutus, who said that during his childhood, his mother recited Longfellow's poems while they did the household chores. A rag rubs on brown soap, swishes yellow lather to nameless plates with chipped rims. She begins by the shining big sea water as I dip dishes in steamy basin. In our tin-roofed township wigwam…
In the thick adobe harvest room back of the old family house he watches his sister gather into bushel baskets caps and whiskey bottles. From his bed he hears her children playing outside, probably priming the old pump beside the cottonwood later they will climb. Sometimes they seem far away. Now on the front porch…
Excuse me, Sir, if sweet words turn to silver bullets in bad light where industrial signs stammer VACANCY all night over peep shows and fortified wines in the eye of the most liveable city. But you see this overcoat won't release me though winter's 5 months through and I'm sick to death of the mouthwash…
East Coker: sun afire in midwinter, rain-of-gold Teardrops at tip of holly and ivy leaf Instills nativity. (A warm day Travelers had of it down from Wells to St. Michael's Church, where T. S. E.'s ancestors Once bowed their heads then sailed for “Jerusalem.”) Scion, return and nest your ashes Here in the wall at…
For years a sign near Randy Miser's yard announced: MEDORA TOWN OF HARMONY A bar of music showed beneath those words the first notes of the scale ordered mi, do, re. I've wondered driving in—to Mel's for beer, past our shut-down factory— what tune that railroad man was whistling while he pounded ties. Who heard…
He makes a myth of everything he does: At dawn he puts his shirt on—that's a poem; At night he takes it off—same deal. Alone, He drinks to blot out the young man he was. Oh, he was fine—muscles rippling, the fire Of subject matter in his eyes: his home Was what he wrote about…
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