Bach must have known how something flutters away when you turn to face the face you caught sideways in a mirror in a hall at dusk and how the smell of apples in a bowl can stop the heart from beating, for an instant, between sink and stove in the dead of winter when stars…
After vespers, after the first snow has fallen to its squalls, after New Wave, after the anorectics have curled into their geometric forms, after the man with the apparition in his one bad eye has done red things behind the curtain of the lid and sleeps, after the fallout shelter in the elementary school has…
“But where will Marcos go?” It's Bruce Lee, last of the Chieu Hois. Taro reading: the Haoles are losing their pois. The barfed-on offer their excusez-mois Hey hey. Thanks for the memo. Un; deux; trois; Banjoist kotoist jingoist Maoist Hoist, the one-man all-girl hula group gets bois trouser and boistrouser half Piaf half ois eau-lyre…
O for ten years, that I may overwhelm Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed That my own soul has to itself decreed. —Sleep and Poetry My Darling C, There is something to be said for Nature after all, dusk pending, variable stars. I have had a change in luminosity. All winter long,…
Our message to the world. Our Galilean artifact up there. Our pagean try our puffery our paean. Sheer heroism. Sean Connery down mean dering mean ducts. To the perfect Jean Valjean getaway. Through a time-bombed ocean. Our gadgetman our dreamboat our DeLorean doing the bluejean limbo leading the mangroves their cerulean elverings and rean…
Dear Philip— The rain. It held off for Marni's graduation this afternoon. Yesterday I wrote you but you were two days a dead man, Jon called this morning to say. “Oh No, no,” is this what we always let out? “Oh no,” and “At least he . . .” Well, you did live by force…
Because I'm up in Air Force One I get to wear my gold-braid baseball cap. And stand before the map of New El Salvador explaining which came first our game of chicken or the other guy's. And burst into applause because. But you know what I miss, all by myself like this? The motorized advance…
A spinster swats a worm on her tabletop. It was heading for the waffles or the coffee. She's read about this in the tabloids, oceanic worms with nerve systems like radio signals. They are blind as ice picks and don't care. They come in the morning when you're barely awake and carve their initials on…
Love no one, work, and don't let the pack know you're wounded . . . Stupid, disappointed strategies. Hazel wind of dusk, I have lived so much. Friendless eeriness of the new street — The poem does not come, but its place is kept set.
Winter 1991-92 - Digital