Poetry

  • Blame

    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,…

  • Ensenada Maternity Ward

    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…

  • New Car

    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,…

  • November, Mesnil-en-Thelle

    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 Theory

         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…

  • Cant

    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…

  • The Tree

    They have grafted pieces of an ape with a dog. . . Then, what they have, wants to live in a tree. No, it wants to lift its leg and piss on the tree. . .

  • Self-Knowledge

    High above the slant snow and sludged traffic, smug as Horace on the Sabine Farm and twice as indolent, I read Horace until the gray is wholly drained from the afternoon. The docile sheep, the fire fed by a servant, those jars of Falernian for which the occasion is pleasure itself maturing in the cellar…

  • The Breast

         One night a woman's breast came to a man's room and began to talk about her twin sister.      Her twin sister this and her twin sister that.      Finally the man said, but what about you, dear breast?      And so the breast spent the rest of the night talking about herself.      It was the same as…