Poetry

  • Atrium

    Dawning, but for whom? He lies unconscious, broken by the surf of sleep, marbled skin and bluish lips, green anisocorion. A bond of godhead almost extinguished with the arriving blood-red dawn. Who now can conjure feeling for someone permeated by dark and light of spent passion, whose shrivelled lips remind one of worn fruit? Let…

  • Three Swiss Tales

    The first has a town for a setting, with a tower and a street with trees, and in their shade farmers' wives selling the fruit of their labors and the handiwork of their daughters. The men are sitting under the trellis of the Cheval Blanc or in the Café du Soleil and the talk is…

  • This Garden

    There is no excitement in the dove's call. We think we know what he means, and that he would say it whether or not we heard. We think there is a garden lined with poplars and wrought-iron benches, painted white, where obedient children sit studying shadows among the pebbles along the walks. In this garden…

  • ‘Richard’

    “While I go through the procedures      expected of me (pouring milk on cornflakes,      complaining about homework, playing a game of catch      with my father) I observe, I collect evidence until      I become certain: They are all actors — mother,      students at school, father, salesmen in stores, bus drivers;      crowds walking on the Green or sunbathing…

  • Bach, Winter

    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 the Grand Perhaps

         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…

  • Oyster Bar on the Road to Mururua

    “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…