(from Jacob van Ruisdael and for John Updike) My topsoil coverlet, dampened by a coast that’s warmed by mediation of the sea, shall be transformed (I’ll paint them) into hills, crags bearing castles, churches, theology for which a million suffering soldiers died. A birch tree (blasted) leans along one border to balance the other (a…
Jelka’s profile decorates the doorway to my secret architecture. Jelka’s profile chaffs at its own imposture, and the indirection of its stardust infiltrates my polar brain: Welcome to the material world where omens of the after-world are leaked, flowing like a black shirt. Mountains migrate into my head: I was there to witness the vulgar…
In every direction drought breaks this land down to the lapses, the scraps of itself: water recoiling from the riverbank, sparse crops corroding in the fields where a crow’s tailfeathers scratch up the ground’s faintest color — drooping, the trees split . . . I feel as highstrung as a woodharp, its sweet sharp whine…
It’s that vague feeling of panic That sweeps over you Stepping out of the #7 train At dusk, thinking, This isn’t me Crossing a platform with the other Commuters in the sad half-light Of evening, that must be Someone else with a newspaper Rolled tightly under his arm Crossing the stiff, iron tracks Behind the…
I called her my untamable cupcake, she was a humanoid in jodhpurs, a jigsaw on the stage of the ballet. We met in a tourist cabin near a famous crater. Macaroni in leotards, I noted in my notebook. She could prattle until the floodlights goo-ed her lollipop. A sarcasm, fervent and amplified, that could stop…
The slow light coming on, And sudden wind, dry heat And no dove song. I look up From whatever I have been All night thoughtfully reading, From the dim abstractions That crowd a table at dawn, And I hear my named called — A low, insistent sound — Though no one is here. All night…
Each year is like a snake that swallows its tail. How long since we have learned, of seasons, the paradigm? We know how cloud- scud and scut, north-bred, come scouting The land out for winter, its waiting bulk. Come skirmishing, flanking. Then red leaf, gold leaf, the winter's choked road. Spring Brings hope, even if…
I can’t pick up the vacuum cleaner without remembering our most subtle and tender moments, shooing the sniper from the playground, then picking watermelons. For the past few months my life has read like canned food labels caked with panic. I don’t know if she’s still in Tokyo or on her way to Zanzibar. I…
Those good students who only loved working through pages of exercises, but were too good to object to the philanthropy of physical recreation took a bus to the Grand Concourse and another one down it, modelled after the Champs Elysees in Paris France, to the aging YMHA by Yankee Stadium. We stumbled on the basketball…
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