Poetry

On another side of the world, vendors hawk skinned rabbits, olives peppered with the dust of cheese. And each of their streetside stalls opens at dawn, closes at dusk, like flowers, like mussels and sea urchins. This, the memory of one foreign city opens also, reappears in a journal entry left neglected in a drawer,…

Walker Evans, No. 1, Walpole, Maine At this congenial house the mailman stops every day, sits on the porch steps knees spread apart and sips hot chocolate or tea or what they call a little something extra. I imagine myself in these upstairs rooms under gabled roofs sitting before a desk covered with shelf paper…

Farmers, my mother would say, need rain. She imagined their raw faces, the green reflections in their eyes, the sound in the cornfields. In the kitchen, my mother carried her lameness around like a loved pet, pulled herself to the window. I sat where I was, my back to my mother, hoping for weather to…

At eighteen when I worked in Oology, in the Egg Room on the fifth floor, stabled above the door that read Nabokov: Entomology where we looked at tarantulas all during lunch— nature, far from being in me, or something I was “of,” was the courtyard I walked down into, the air a relief from formaldehyde…

Walker Evans, No. 2, Scarborough, New York A photograph of destruction without disaster: the slow disengagement of plaster, wood, brick and concrete. One layer strips away from another while ivy that has come up like a poisonous weed guards the edge of the crumbled wreck. The remnant sections of these two walls take the direct…

The man on the corner, under the green light, he was wearing your hands he was smoking a cigarette he was counting to three before he crossed the street. I plan to spend the winter in hibernation. I do not remember the coldness of snow, I believe it crunches beneath the feet I believe the…

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…