Poetry

Almost two thousand years before Da Vinci imagined a machine whose screwlike overhead motor could lift the machine into vertical flight, children in China played with bamboo toys whose propellers, thin and light as dragonfly wings, were set on a sharpened stick and spun into the wonder of an object spiraling in the air. The…

Taller than a man pitched from the earth garbled needle blackened now its volute screed bee- and beetle-ridden up and down between the un- sprung buds, the wild efficient feel of smocked rabbit-skinned explosions poised so slowly on its undertaking that it was so long being true the cold and the craftless was not craft…

Your body— not disappeared into the grave but into   blizzarding swan-colored lines   of lace—holding something like your shape.   And just like flesh you open, absorbing each stray iridescence, each veil of updraft,   upswirl, white noon scattering your edges, you’re something like a dress I can’t put on.   I am building…

My dead mother is more beautiful than yours.   My dead mother will always be more beautiful than yours.   Even her deadness is more beautiful.

and everyone was there to watch you die. We offered you popsicles, ice, a sponge we’d dab on your lips. We crowded you, stroked your legs, your hair, tried to keep you kempt without hurting, disturbing you, prodding you until your eyes, when they opened, couldn’t hold us. We hated that, hated your stillness, your…

Of your things now, one more of the things that survived you.   I wear your long gray herringbone coat into long gray days, returning always to your other objects:   drawers of good silverware, spices, framed madonnas   who look at me, wondering what I have done.   When you said you were afraid…

Landscape of small saints with champagne. Landscape with island out window with window as large as the house and its shadow   Landscape of doors and their doorways Landscape of the hallway that runs between them joining one outside to the other.   Landscape of child in doorway smiling and that of the faces watching…

Landscape of umbrellas flying over Brussels, itself the shadow; somewhere glass sparkles in the background, pear trees in the background, flower   Landscape through two glasses of water the Rhine bordered by trees slightly therefore flowing green the boats thus moving through two layers —water glass and river— the bells strung between that follow in…

You said both hermit and hermetic in the same sentence and I said that if you are receptive then you don’t need to be an artist. I have had a hermetic life in poetry and in the sanctity of a sacred love, in one sense but not in another. You said the word demarcation and…