Poetry

June, I don't have to use magic burned into roots of      antelope words to tell you what I mean, when I say I met myself in the      Egyptian Room just a few days before my thirty-sixth birthday. It wasn't      vertigo, though vertigo is common in the bowels of the concrete monster.      Crossing Fifth Avenue was…

Blue Sea, black, in the hotel room He paces up and down and at The door the waiter is knocking: A glass of water, there you are, sir.      How my head is pounding      From my head Behind the wall the old thunder groans. He roars so loud that no sound comes. The lily sleeps behind…

It stands like a resentment. The mind's city unfolded to a huge, discordant image. Recollection closes in on the ancient buildings, the fractured curbs, and in all the places you might have known, women walk in the opposite direction. Onward to their first novel, the fictional release. I look through a great eye, seeing more…

“Here I was begging the Muse not to get me in troble with the powers that be, not to make me write out all those ‘filthy’ words, all those scandalous, scabrous lines, pointing out in that deaf and dumb language which I employed when dealing with the Voice that soon, like Marco Polo, Cervantes, Bunyan…

Like through a telescope Planted in a fresh grave, I see through your nostrils, Darkly, the more distant past. Stubborn your horse skull That knows of the price on its head. Like a plate empty for days We stretch our hands out of the frame. A bloody yoke swims through The egg white of the…

It was made to play by itself over telephones on ears that had receivers on clotheslines, on steeplechase frenzy of the tight road, for strings are made of the human kind, hands, and the bowels of music which stretch from the fingers, and into a mother's hair. You can cut the hair so short on…

In winter the wolf lets its hair grow thicker. Thick as a bush unaware of its thorns. And the coat grows darker, the way the meaning of a shadow falls deeper into the darkness of the mind and fear starts its own season. Then the wind sharpens the wolf's teeth the way hunger does. A…

Nights in the barn, the clean astringence of urine steaming into the tendrils of a dungfire, the cattle sleeping their own way, and me mine, despite the puppies tied to the housepost, their lean mother snapping, the only      window stuffed with straw. To keep out snakes? No. Reic shifts at watch. To block the cuckold's…

for Roy De Carava For a boy on the street in 1920 you don't need art supplies, some colored chalk for hopscotch, the pigeontoed balls of the feet. At the Guggenheim you don't figure a white dress on a black woman's wedding day is really subject matter for the Family of Man, but she enters…