“Blind are still the eluded eyes.” That’s Swinburne, who would not interest, hardly an author for this trip taken away from me, this time by your own choice, not your mother’s. I smile, you flash inflamed brown eyes, letting me see that no good will and certainly no money paid to the lady clerk who…
Grates, blinds, weeds in all the ground floor windows. Sirens, whooping wounded birds, lead love harmlessly away from the scene of his soul’s animal injury: The look on his face: Mother, I have wet my pants with blood. We pleaded blood, blood get back in that body. But the blood looked happy to be out…
We lay him down in silence as if we were the first people and we did not have words. We lay him down in silence as if death were unexpected and we had nothing to say. A priest without vestments gives the commandment of grief and our tongues are bitter with salt. One by one,…
Just as March twirls blackbirds out the back of winter like the souls of last summer’s leaves, you can recall a town, call it back twenty-five years, make it recollect itself in cotton dresses, refill its fields with pheasants, gather everyone’s dead father in shirtsleeves. You can bring down the dead from the town trees,…
Darius Milhaud, last of les six, advised me (his final day in Paris, from his highly polished black and chrome wheelchair, gaunt, arthritic, a worn angel under his uninsured Légers the Germans had left behind) the most delicious roasted chicken that he ever ate was cooked up by Brancusi, in the…
Just outside Oberlin Ohio old John Deeres pull wagon loads of wheat into the sticky afternoon. Combines the size of elephants roll into the long fields and begin to feed. This is a day of dull surprises, a cut on the hand, sunburn on the back of the neck. And in the wheat, grasshoppers aware…
to Barry Spacks The poet is reading a novel. One line, then another line, they are all linked! It’s all in there — “The German columns advancing like banks of clouds!” They make a sense which escapes him. That brother who was left behind with an uncle in the third chapter turns up now, trying…
The city called Balzac fumed in a small space: “I took the air only at that window which dominates Paris, which I mean to dominate.” Twenty six days in the wilderness of his study He conspired, with coffee, an empire in the brain As each mansion became his, each lady, each alley In a jungle…
“Good-humored surrealism fills Louthan’s poems with strange furniture” Booklist Finally, a few years late, and I’ve stayed home from work the whole time watching for them at the window of this empty house, the men show up from the Good-Humored Surrealism furniture outlet, which wasn’t the name of the company when I placed my order or…
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