Small operas, the seedy merchants at the blurred ends of fuming streets in the immigrant photographs, insist on it. What are you supposed to do with desire in America where your heart is so many poor shops? He takes a girl to the Catskills on a bus. Her dull kerchief and the black hairs wire…
for wisdom bits, I had to act now that father'd suited me up for St-hood. Better late next time. It wasn't that I minded my toy-razor or lathering up so early, just that the sink swallowing my hairless suds would go all the way to hell and back before it let on there was anything…
We tore into each other's fragrances enough to hold Wednesday to its last possible moment, but it swept across the windows nevertheless. He always set the table and never cleared it, hoping dinner would break through into something that wouldn't wipe away. They said it was past closing time at the Indian restaurant. We both…
A pupa of pain, I sat and lay one July, companioned by the bird the Indians called “four hundred tongues.” Through the dark in the backyard by my bed, through the long day near my front couch, the bird sang without pause an amplified song “two-thirds his own,” books told me, “and one-third mimicry.” Gray…
He holds a slender cappucino cup As still as anything I see or feel. He licks the chilled lime soup line from his lips. I lie about my name and where I'm from; I'd never tell him anything I've done. Without talking, he seems a dream of want. I look for splinters in the picket…
(sonnet from the German of Georg Heym, 1911, freely translated with apologies for the anachronism of using the modern world ‘gulag’ in line four; its purpose is to suggest certain modern analogies with this pre-1914 poem of tsarist Russia, even in such very specific details as the slave labor camps “beyond Verkhoyansk”; today the “abominated”…
Somewhere, maybe in the spirit, effort is trying to remain lost and unnoticed when truly it is the substantial: carrier of bells and evenings, light crisp and unnecessary hugging a wall. A black wall which children shriek at and hit with sticks—no point but much effort. A man stands up, his house is a desk….
One of the laws the pseudo-commissioner decreed: We were to plug our memory sockets Into the damaged main-frame he kept locked In his dungeon. With the flick of his switch, Worlds began to crumble. Or so we thought. And in these quasi-desperate straits Only one person could save us. He'd need A pack of radar…
I wish we were our furthest father’s father. A clump of slime within a warming swamp. Living and dying, fertilizing, bearing, We’d ooze our essence, numb and damp. A sprout of algae or a sandy hillock, Formed by the winds and heavy with earth’s clutch. Then quits; even a pond-bug’s head, a gull’s wing Would…
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