Poetry

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…

(“You can even make something not a poem become a poem . . . by a certain squint or a certain way of leaning our ears we find them.” W.S.) If I could only squint like Bill Stafford then I would be in that country where men and women speak poetry, unsurprised, as trees speak…

White birches scream winter, their treetops fright wigs attenuated in the arc light. Small planes and radio-beacon spires dot the black sky like stars amid the cirrus patches scurrying north for denser cover. Out in the russia-flats between cities wheatlike anonymous marshgrass denies the complications of leavetaking or arrival. Towns pale the dark with self-importance….

My name is Pablo Picasso And my name rhymes In French, in Catalan, even in American As I travel, stopping often To call aloud the single word Lady I find my ghost is still feared. I’d like to answer: This was my body, I give it to you, And this my art, which is only…