Poetry

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…

I hate and love. Ignorant fish, who even wants the fly while writhing.

He’s been wading deeper into the accident area where he’s the fatherless son and the sonless father. He walks on through the valley and over the mountains, some still virgin, with the same concentration, heart, he has benefited from this spill. He is now betrothed to blue, at home with her wisdom of refracted light,…

I like almost imperceptibles, near still lifes — a limpet sloping full-tilt down a rock: thunder mooching among mountains, trailing delicate diminuendos: a mushroom hoisting a paving slab on its darning-egg head: and the brooch on her dress rising so quietly, so quietly falling. Don’t judge me by that: I like suddennesses too — fistfuls,…

The hour was late, and the others were asleep. He struck a match on the wooden railing of the porch, and lit a cigarette. She beheld his head and hand, estranged from the body in wavering light. . . . What she felt then would, like heavy wind and rain, bring any open flower to…

Stars fell all night. The iceman had been very generous that day with his chips and slivers. And I had buried my pouch of jewels inside a stone casket under the porch, their beauty saved for another world. And then my sister came home and I threw a dart through her cheek and cried all…