Poetry

* Is it for me to call her by her name, she at whose command the air is blessed tonight and the roads lie without the slightest ounce of perturbation Ezi di mma? Or is it for me to hold back from all such mention of her name and let what is sheltered rest as…

I have seen that moon face rise behind my shoulder in the mirror like a bum floating up from the sidewalk bribing his own disappearance with the reminder that suffering reeks to high heaven. Money’s prayers are always answered. The bums go. Delmore stays behind my shoulder as I shave whispering like a dust pan…

None of this seems real, seen from the east and older. The red-eyed Guernsey bull, his warning signal stopped by the stooks of corn. This wilderness is Thickly Settled and the Berkshires’ blue surrounds my day.            In Amherst, everything checked in its fall: sacrificial stance of thistle, flash of pumpkins in the field, tomatoes…

Almonds that meet the aroma of horses, and apple orchards in October, oaths sworn in dawn mist, the porgy roaming the ocean floor with one eye open to the sea. I hold you near my elbow, and far away on the mountain you gather the soaked grain that the orphaned Assyrian carries      to his mother….

A blind student lives in the room closet to the courtyard. When he descends with his dog we step deftly out of the way and say hello. He is good and his dog is good but sometimes you gasp as he approaches a curb or a group talking with their backs turned and want to…

Why does one say that the heart sings? when it is not the heart, but the voice that does: if the leg could sing, it might; if the pump lodged in the chest could sing, it would make such clear deep sounds, as only that cellist makes, playing Bach, the man of the brook, whose…

Across an alley, opposite exactly my window: Intensive Care Unit. At night I’ll sit in my dark and stare into its greenly lit lucidity: I can almost read the X-rays hung on the wall — two bad ghost pears, the lungs . . . Plasma bottles glister, beep-machines, a blur of women and men in…

Men who do not wear watches know The sad infusion a concave glass Withholds. A life readies For forgetfulness its forward distances, But these wheels return their moment In the thrash of sex. When afterwards You ask what time it is, I cannot forswear How near we are to that far country Where the sun…

We counted the epochs with venerable names, with dry      thorns, with dry asphodel — Justinian, Mavrikios, the Androniki Kommini Paleologi, Mr. Manouil with his long worry beads made of thick      amber — “Renowned city” they called it; “the cloud-topped      stronghold of all that is Greek”; and the three reservoirs opposite the illustrious Sea of      Myrtoo…