Poetry

Let us those who have obliterated so many faces deny their own faces let us grant them no faces let us blot out their faces the sun eats the snow                        let time devour their faces let us look for the faces of those they killed who died faceless in the name of…

     How the coffin was not even carried by pall bearers but lamely rolled on wheels from the hears. Not even the weight of the body. Not that last presence felt by any other body. Alex in aluminum. Left out of the earth under the hired canvas pavilion on that plastic grass. One of the hinges…

Strolling through Carcasonne is, after all, Of interest, to the noonday touring spirit That moves us toward the booth, clapping as help In ages past the Michelin testament. One notes the battlements, presentable As any movie-set; the tidy chapel, Its table for petition-signing busy Amid the Gothic shades; houses and shops Leaning together over courts…

In the darkening barn, one bulb stares, fly-specked. I squat the stool, lean my brow in against her loin. She moans, already dripping in the pail. I inhale the ammonia of hay and urine. It doesn’t clear my head. Instead, a foggy, white river winds through a cheese-green valley, grass still poking through the snow….

Your chest and arms around me hang to my clothes. I had forgotten how your curly hair twisted my stomach, how your broad shoulders spiked my body with nerves. You said it was so easy; that you loved the man from the moment your hands touched. And all our problems suddenly made sense. How useless…

Well, then, since the changing light announces early evening, we two, who knew you, walk arm in arm, up from this sea village. What is that rising from the sea wreathed in a spray of songs? Is it the great original fish wallowing landward, or only the common sphere, itself, rolled in its blue waters?…

By August the remains will be a rope in dust, a theology, a brown snake too limp with sun to struggle. I return it to the house, unless it’s rotten, and consider the year, the hole that gapes in the seatboard. How emptied I must be, day after day. Easter on, I feed the rope…

It may all have started in nothing more than your adolescent fascination with the           future:      whom shall I marry —      rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief? and the slavewomam’s contribution may at first have been no more than fortune-telling: an eggwhite in a glass. But for one of you, the glass held a specter in…

A few poplars stand by the frozen river. Over the lashed and flowing wilderness dull daylight stretches the sky to a wheel of slate-blue edges. Night is Norwegian Finmark blue. Fathers of cold winters, mothers and children with white teeth, all fade away toward evening. Twilight gathers pulkkas and reindeer into its wilderness. Then ropes…