Poetry

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…

Nothing is and nothing in itself is a mountain. I know nothing except certain brief anecdotes: The wall has bricks. The Navy has cigarettes. The wide world is an old horizon. The chair is flat and without boundaries. There is no reason to call it a chair. But we do, and you know it is…

Three inch caramel-colored field slug on its back, vibrating by the scraps of a big Amanita Muscaria It has eaten more than its size and now its true size in visionary trance makes me sad of my size — I can never eat enough of a higher order to trick the interior leper to the…

Bound in my car, parallelograms of light shifting in front of me, red      & white, darkness coming on like a sock, the ankle of the day — I notice two skaters out on the perilous river where the ice wrinkles like agony on a face in shock —                  (daring, or indifferent? Their hockey…