Poetry

All whom I love, all neighbors and relations awry and pure, all intimates of the same heart-paths, all strangers I would know would want to go there, would be compelled thuswards: the most northern, unknown, uninvented, patchy, unvisited on the maps. And I would go with them. In shivering boats, leaky carracks, floats of reed…

I killed the bee for no reason except that it was there and you      were watching, disapproving, which made what I would do much worse but I was angry      with you anyway and so I put my foot on it, leaned on it, tested how much I'd need to make that resilient,      resisting cartridge give…

Drinking, looking into the glass, I see a deep well, some clouds moving over it. At the bottom, a small lizard. A gold vapor swimming up. His eyes are blue, sad. He says listen you've had enough of one world, now try two. He melts back into the glass, the clouds break off. I swear,…

Where no question possibly remains—someone crying,      someone dead—blame asks: whose fault? It is the counterpart, the day to day, the real-life, of those      higher faculties we posit, logic, reason, the inductions and deductions we yearningly      trace the lines of with our fingers. It also has to do with nothing but itself, a tendency, a habit,…

This is where they put all the women: the mothers, the injured, the diseased. Someone has moved into the bed next to mine: we share a water pitcher and a bar of soap. Her name is Irena. She is the color of burnt umber, tinged yellow by jaundice and alcohol. She smells of urine and…

Doesn't, when we touch it, that sheen of infinitesimally      pebbled steel, doesn't it, perhaps, give just a bit, yes, the subtlest yielding, much less than flesh      would, we realize that, but still, as though it were intending in some formal way that      at last we were to be in contact with the world of inorganics,…

The wild snow foretelling winter the snow that whistles down the supernatural into the ordinary world the snow that covers the little matchgirl while she dreams the snow that melts in the gypsies' campfire that melts in their song that snakes over the black branches in the North of France where my aunt calls to…

     The big one went to sleep as to die and dreamed he became a tiny one. So tiny as to have lost all substance. To have become as theoretical as a point.      Then someone said, get up, big one, you're not doing yourself any good. You puddle and stagnate in your weight. Best to be…

Just me and St. John of the Cross in our little room, starving and half-dead. We play bride and bridegroom as the sun rises, the stones cool under our heads . . . He always wants to be the bride, I let him cuz he's so sweet. In the afternoons he teaches me how to…