Poetry

  • 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…

  • Withering

    All withers in the autumn air: wine quickly wears off: Bleak and dismal, it's always      like feelings felt at parting. At dusk, I lean on a pillar:      I don't go home; My heart breaks at the patter of wind and rain      on the green lotus.

  • Proof

    So far no one's confirmed the words that say                              we're made of earth.                  Yet there they are in writing.      A title on the blackboard — the teacher                        vanished without warning,                  his lecture gone undelivered.            Tell me, you digger of deep wells,            …

  • Tune: Echoing Heaven’s Everlastingness No.1

    Orioles bubble in the shade of green sophora, secluded courtyard empty this spring day noon;                  painted curtain hangs,                  golden phoenixes dance, solitary, but the embroidered screen, one stick of incense.                  Clouds in the azure sky                  have no fixed home;      in vain my dreaming soul comes and goes;…

  • Birthplace

    What if time came to a stop? Surely the end would be struck dumb. Up on the hill the house where you were born is waiting for you to build it again. How and with what — bricks, wasn't it? The chimney's all you can remember: smoke vanishing in spirals like the string of a…