June 1976 I had an argument five summers ago, with Mary Kisataose. We argued in her village, which was a day’s walk. This argument . . . it was about a bee. What happened was this. We were sitting with children, at a table of hers. She had a jar of jam from the Hudson…
It is cold this evening. One of the first cold evenings of autumn. I have your shirt over my own. I am not hungry. I am starving. And I look for the laws of all this. I write down a new name, Cyrene, beloved of Apollo. To look up. To learn about it before spring….
This part of the country is definitely a corner pocket when it comes to word music. For instance although he’s got a tin ear over there under the palm trees and Nazi architecture of Cal Tech the only poet/editor in SoCal who can fit an entire cantaloupe in his mouth without opening his lips is…
* 1. First thing to know is, I’d never seen a cello until then, and haven’t since. I didn’t know what to call it. Someone named it cello for me. One day this man appears with it. It was Tiúk. He’d been known to live under rocks. Every so often he arrived with a wood…
At six this morning the moon is ragged on one side but smiling as if a mild wind were blowing. Not any more indentured. The beginnings of color please her. She thinks of the one who dreamed of her and stayed behind on the island. Imagines walking to him through the empty cafe. To say…
Those bungalows of San Roque so perfect yet oddly sad (“a little wood & stucco to keep the sun out”) always remind me of where the Nelson family lived way back in the days of Hi Oz Hi Pop Hi Rick Hi David. Everybody in that family was Okay every day for a whole decade….
“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,…
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