Poetry

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….

Someone came in to ask how are you only I couldn’t quite hear the words, I thought he was asking who. who are you? so I started to say my name’s Jordan, only I never got past the vowel I’m Joe just Joe call me Joe then I stopped to think maybe I really am…

Then the mind is a white room behind the eyes — the heart beats, far below like an animal breathing quietly in sleep, emptying over and over. If anyone comes please say I am not at home. Bones are a glass staircase I climb without looking down. A hand held to the light, glows red…

IV. Most of the old buildings are gone now — you can blame fire, or progress, or both. Forensic Hall, known to some as “Frenzy,” built by the students in 1874: demolished before the first World War: Forensic and dancing — thermometer two degrees above zero. The cotillion: Five couples plus two stags, the hall…

She writes that she has not been well and adds “but this will not be news.” She complains of the rise in the cost of living and notes that Alfred, the parrot, has died. “Or feigns to have.” She is not sure except that the bird has not stirred in a fortnight. “Do parrots hibernate?”…

By the road in the field they stand, lifting branches they cannot remember, rocking shut in the wind. In some other world they grew such trunks and hurled their leaves across the sky. Now, emptyhanded, they wait for the end which has been happening for years. Nodding off beside telephone wires, tethered to farmhouses, the…