Poetry

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 —…

The bricks pale, two by two, behind the fire Laid across dread-hot dragontails. One ear cocked for a free lance, you’re stalled Above — or no, below — tonight’s pyre Of loveknots quite untied in style. Whose scales Measure me? you ask. For that matter, inspire? Or so you’d write, set straight, complain To me…

Selfless deeds have a way of repaying their doer. for instance, the man, a simple business traveler who rescues a pitiful horse from a mud hole, covers him with his cloak, doesn’t return in the next life as a pony stuck like a bewildered musician in a swamp eyeing people going by with eyes brimming…

Something is cooking with no containing wall something vague to the point of being a lesion peering blindingly from a wall in which it is weightless, without size, in need of a caustic restless shoulder that seems to be rowing, translating one-way forever deeper Perched there, Bernifal rides back and forth warbling at times into…

The building needs a few repairs — though some rooms are still comfortable and warm. Where is the landlord? No landlord’s there. A fire burned up the back stairs; we thought it was a false alarm. The building needs a few repairs. We thought “love” was a house of air: my hand got caught; you…