Poetry

We’d met by chance. Once. Late at night. Me, off the ship Pireus harbour, banging loudly on your door for entry, shouting in the dark: Fo Fo! Fo Fo! You in there not answering. Busy? A friend? Fo Fo! Open up. It’s only me Fo Fo. Finally the door opens a measure on its chain…

Trunk, branches, leaves — sere and blemished — I am not what I wanted. Dignity is a hindrance. I am weighted with notions and unbalanced by fear. Night sweats, vapours. Why am I frightened alone on the street? Nothing’s here — a pair of brown squirrels — a few fallen apples — These rococco grimaces,…

Stop looking like a purse. How could a purse squeeze under the rickety door and sit, full of satisfaction, in a man’s house? You clamber towards me on your four corners— right hand, left foot, left hand, right foot. I love you for being a toad, for crawling like a Japanese wrestler and for not…

He’s everywhere here; not as he looks in his photos but in his mind, habits — that elegantly refined, withdrawn decadence. I glimpse or pass him everywhere: at night walking quickly down a back alley close to the walls’ shadow, afternoons in a teahouse alone glancing over the edge of his foreign newspaper, the rims…

We drive up the winding road lined by graying sycamores, a blessing in the summer heat. At a small table, between the stones, a man and two women nibble crustless sandwiches, pour from a silver pot of tea. They have their arrangements: dour frigidity of gladioli, faded dresses, a musty gentility. We have brought a…

On that stormy night a top branch broke off on the biggest tree in my garden. It’s still up there. Though its leaves are withered black among the green the living branches won’t let it fall.

— Wittgenstein, Tractatus The world is everything that is the case From the fly giving up in the coal-shed To the winged Victory of Samothrace. Give blame, praise, to the fumbling God Who hides, shame-facedly, His agèd face; Whose sun retires behind its veil of cloud. The world, though, is also so much more —…

Everyone’s real world is a memory biscuit lodged somewhere in the spine or the ribs—a question of how one sits, when a strange kid is howling and you’re thinking: now my kid will be interested in the      classics. Meanwhile, the biscuit dreams pulp of childhood and lumpy adolescence nudging its way to the table after…

Robin, I watch you. You are perfect robin — except, shouldn’t you be perched on a spade handle? Robin, you watch me. Am I perfect man — except, shouldn’t I have poison in my pocket, a gun in my hand? I, too, am in my winter plumage, not unlike yours, except, the red is in…