Poetry

It becomes cold and colder the year has no color in it little Dimitri plays the piano until his fingers stiffen with cold. Cold in the line waiting for bread six hours make us patient thin animals waiting as though bread is an unfamiliar food a kind of miracle we hardly expect. We give it…

The horse beneath me seemed To know what course to steer Through the horror of snow I dreamed, And so I had no fear, Nor was I chilled to death By the wind’s white shudders, thanks To the veils of his patient breath And the mist of sweat from his flanks. It seemed that all…

When the shift was over he went out and stood under the night sky a mile from the darkened baseball stadium and waited for the bus. He could taste nickel under his tongue, and when he swiped the back of his hand across his nose he caught the smell of hydrochloric acid. There were clouds…

We decided to have the abortion, became killers together. The period that came changed nothing. They were dead, that young couple who had been for life. As we talked of it in bed, the crash was not a surprise. We went to the window, looked at the crushed cars and the gleaming curved shears of…

The sky begins nearer the ground when a red shirt hangs on the line in rain, the rain invisible until wind pushes it sideways, the long diagonals striping the air, taut as if they passed through hands. Like something valuable, spoons, with their silver tongues on the porch, leap where the string pierced them; the…

Lightning cracks its red and green and violet whips, or sets its white hooks deep into our soundest sleep, and you wake. Four a.m. Towers of air, dark glaciers you imagine them, lurch together, avalanching, rumbling forward under earth and sill. Rain scours down in bushels, or pops off your windows like a spray of…

The gendarme came to tell me you had hung yourself on the door of a rented room like an overcoat like a bathrobe hung from a hook; when they forced the door open your feet pushed against the floor. Inside your skull there was no room for us your circuits forgot me. Even in Paris…

1 The boats go by in another world. I am living on shore with one sparrow. He sings the whole day outside my door, but when I am quiet, late mornings in bed, or sitting at my desk unmoving, he comes nearer, bangs on the stove-pipe, waking an echo to ask if I’ve gone. He…

for RS, 1921-1981 Blunder slips at heel. Scald and slather. Flake and sore. Nothing slick as shit. At 23, your hair turned the color of old tenement, your tongue sweet as a cat’s. If you gave yourself nine lives, who could blame you? Every day, dawn leaks down the void of lights at Pontiac Assembly….