Poetry

(“If Innocent” is from The Idiot Princess of the Last Dynasty, a book-length collection of monologues spoken by Dr. Matthew Mighty-grain-o-salt Dante O’Connor, the character in Djuna Barnes’ novel Nightwood. O’Connor is an American Irishman from San Francisco, a flamboyantly homosexual, unlicensed gynecologist, and a non-stop raconteur. In “If Innocent” he recalls (for Ignace, his…

The Greek takes Trixie on midnight walk, not much talk except she points skunk and he runs after it. Which started Trixie thinking, “Gee this guy’s different. Maybe I feel better if I let him move in.” When she finds out his love ever after stuff means give up stripjoints cut down drugs — He…

We sit down at the table, with the herbs, the dish of salt, the plates and the broken bread. Everything is in order, everyone in his place peers out like a sentry from his skull, when the door opens and we see the palms of heaven. No one disturbs us, and yet news arrives: we…

Nothing like 10 in the morning for making love — cats glaring from the table opposite, the dog watching gloomily from the rug, and after, opening cans of their food, you in the shower singing while elevators ring up through the sidewalk, carrying their racks of dresses, the noises of ordinary business: unloading, loading. Later,…

In the garden a doe and fawn chew roses with pink geraniums. A grey three-legged cat lurching across the lawn freezes to sniff a gopher hole. Smooth as thin milk, a shiny snake flows into the ivy leaves. Lady-birds swarm in the air, like gnats. One living thing is still: a slimy slug, poor homeless…

On my longest walk I saw the coast’s down-slant three times repeated: in the eaten-under limestone across the channel; the color of hidden candlelight under the chateau, des Lombards; then red in the huge cape — each layer as if wanting to slip undersea, and then another above, the pressure, and the last exploding in…

On my left arm a fat bruise The size of a water bug; Though not so fleet — This one will linger for weeks, Patient, glowering; Look — Jupiter’s wild, shifting face: Swift eddies, rotating iridescence, At the center a red hot Eye (don’t touch!) Round which black winds whirl. Strange fertile beauty, So at…

When thinking fails a certain love shrivels when thinking flaps its wings like a confused sparrow the hungry owl is alerted when thinking tries to bully itself a trap door opens onto a coffin lined with gymnastic weights but when thinking steps outside itself . . . cross any border with oxygen your only luggage!

Ulysses’ shadow dancing with a herd of monsters, winding its paleo-way through corridors half-shed of horse and ibex It winds into a tower Gaudi dreamed children blowing like sky-blue fluff across the roof of a world without straight line or right angle So that the wily meanderer still lives even if in Catholic drag —…