Poetry

The wolf discovers his fur is changing: gone flat now, sleek as sealskin. Once grey, now hazel, his gaze holds past territory, past food to memory and meeting. A giraffe he approaches stares before bolting. Shrills of alarm through the jungle. He deserts the ancestors’ feeding ground. He grazes now, like another, calmer species. At…

I like the way wasps always put me in mind of washing, when the summer was bright and the shade fell in stripes from the shutters. Then the blood runs swift in its vessels, the spots on vipers’ skins seem sharper. Even brambles grow venomous, women stroll down to the shore to watch in the…

Gladly they turned from the tragedy of six years gone to peaceful forests. Yet for many, old at twenty, life seemed phantasmagoric; and Cupid stumped on crutches. They took mint from the cold, cave-mouth springs and drank in the cool evenings, and drank in the warm afternoons, or dozed and dreamed, the ruined ladies, the…

And one other thing, Fear not she is frail This young girl though she’s slender You’ve seen the pitless bee Swoop hard in his flower — But no stem’s ever snap’t Take her firmly. No half-hesitant pressing’s Gotten all the sugarcane’s Sap. — Anonymous from the Subhàsitàvalì

The air opens like an invisible flower; the petals of night and day embrace. In the very center a rock stares into itself. Wandering stars come to rest in the shape of a skull. Men and women rush barefoot to the peak, drying their eyes on their frozen clothes. Tears of summer, tears of winter…

1. I lived as others do, avoiding death, deploring evils I dared not oppose, and making what I could of the distractions, until I woke one morning with the words: “There shall be neither rain nor dew these       years except according to my word; thus saith the Lord” — and I, as one still…

                only partly accounted for by the old delivery truck laden with bread      that hums up the coastline highway                      the redtail hawks switch to and fro on the crosswinds, they           drift towards sunrise and sunset                            stitching the wind of the east to the wind of the west

That morning there was no sun, only a powder of strong light as if two suns were shining. We awoke in an armistice of colors, colors hiding in the depths of themselves, their white Sunday clothes. Came noon, the bearer of fruits that assuage no hunger. In the testicles, joy: the sign that somewhere the…

(“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…