Poetry

Let me tell you What nothing means. In the boy’s room At the grade school, I stood before the urinal — I was ten, I think — And there before The absolute whiteness Of the cool fixtures, While my pale urine Smacked the porcelain And fell down In the narrow plumbing, I stared straight At…

You have to stop thinking of the 4th of July As a time to bang pots in the back yard And watch for rockets. You can’t expect The food just to be handed to you Hot off the charcoal. You have to stand and talk Through the rippling air to the host with the fork…

I don’t know. They are young, their souls are undeveloped. My own soul is no bigger than a thumbnail, my own soul at 42 is a half-moon on a thumbnail for one of those towns that fit in a crystal globe where anybody can shake down snow. There’s an opening for God in those towns….

It tries to come out of the paper and tear at me With its spider hands and its feet like rakes And its eyes like red targets and its green hair in flames And something else blue and sun-like with rays that      Rebecca says Is a vagina. Annie With the Blue Vagina. Though when my…

What whiteness will you add to this whiteness,      what candor? We walk the dirt road toward town through the clear      evening. The sky is apricot behind the black cane. Pink above, and dull raspberry on the Turkish hills across the water. The Aegean is light by the shore, then dark farther out. I cannot distinguish…

While history is unforgiven . . . Delmore Schwartz Daughter stands with her hands in her furs. She has told Dad about her nude modelling, has the check to cash. Dad himself has seen naked women standing as if their lovers’ paws had just left their hips, caressing them to their smoothness. He’s seen them…

The highway was dark, strung with cats’-eyes, red and      yellow, passing My window where my face floated; I watched Your face above the steering wheel, as always, calm to the      bone; Your brown eyes and full lips droop, but the sadness is      genetic only; The space beside your eyes is like a smooth pool. We…

The Seraphim, whose eyes are jewels, read the Inferno of Dante Alighieri anagogically, without weeping. Justice is a simple thing for them, fluttering in their empty robes. But I once wandered through the Wood of Suicides with a girl who thought Pietro delle Vigne had a perfect right to his own flesh even when he…

I sit by the window of a cafe and watch the thin city rain bounce off the tops of cars and paste the hair of passers-by to their cheeks. Near me, two women talk across the one-legged disk of the table, the grain of shared thinking in their faces. A year ago, we talked like…