Poetry

All through that Sunday afternoon a kite flew above the Sunday, a tightened drumhead, an armful of blown chaff. I’d seen it gray and slippy in the making, I’d tapped it when it dried out white and stiff, I’d tied the bows of newspaper along its six-foot tail. But now it was far up like…

In the night of the changing year I misplaced winter. Tumbling down with the old sins, the promises, I woke up sniffing. No cares. Walkway splashes sing to my ears of an evening in May. The scent of thirty springs is rising. A full-hipped beauty in green, ripe for the flood, bustles over her scrawny…

You think you earned this space on earth, but look at the gold face of the teen-age pharaoh, smug as a shriner in his box with no diploma, a plot flashy enough for Manhattan. Early death, then what a task dragging a sofa into the grave, a couple of floor lamps, the alarm set for…

I. I stood between them, the one with his tawny intelligence and fencer’s containment, his speech like a bowstring and another, unshorn and bewildered in the tubs of his wellingtons, smiling at me for help, faced with this stranger I’d brought him. II. Then the cunning voice of poetry came out of the wood across…

I mastered the easy ones first. I began with avocado pits and lollipops, belt buckles and keys. I learned that the trick was not to chew but to swallow and savor the wholeness of the thing itself. I nurtured a taste for the outrageous. Goldfish and swords had no allure, nor would I swallow anything…

He is the nail and she hits him on the head. Slowly, but most definitely he is disappearing. He is reappearing becoming the board becoming the wall and the walls becoming her home and such a home has she chosen that the windows often change their positions and the floor is wall to wall elevator….

(after Corbière) A ruined convent on the Breton coast — Gathering-place for wind and mist, Where the donkeys of Finistère Sheltered against the ivied walls, Masonry pitted with such gaping holes There was no knowing which one was the door. Lonely but upright, in undiminished pride, The old hag of the countryside, Roof like a…

In bed I’m a mad Hungarian. Propped on pillows, a cup of hot black tea on the night table. I hear a strain of bitter chords a gypsy cart halting. If I could go back that far would I find a small face similar to mine? The crust surrounding a pit of ghetto and merchants…

Packing up, a new swing around a lamp post and down the gummy street each step has a trash can has a wall with a window with curtains has a railing and a pair of legs rising from high heels up and up on through her shoulders up above the rooftops. Night lit like a…