Poetry

The interior is ordinary although at times the light falls like sand, the furniture edges into itself and the far corners of the room relax like seascapes in the numb hours. Everything changes when a man enters the room, especially for women. A woman who is there is unable to leave although she is uncomfortable,…

My father keeps a circle of silver coins around his bed to trap angels. When they arrive to reclaim his soul the silver disintegrates the strange alloy in their wings. My mother poises at a snow-circle’s center in a game of “fox & geese” while her children disappear down a radius into some woods forever….

For Jon Anderson The unhappy . . . will fight shy of Kierkegaard, either because they are not as unhappy as they pretend, or because they really despair of comfort and cling, in defiance, to their suffering! —W. H. Auden I said I could not have built my community Without the other. I will not…

We are in her kitchen; we have one enormous pot and all the spices are together. We are too tiny and take so long to sterilize the jar; finally, more water is boiling, waiting. We don’t have to call, she hears and comes into her kitchen. We lift her over the pot. she slips into…

What human love can compare To the compassion of fishes? For us, the kisses of the mouth Are enough, but for them It isn’t too much To open their whole insides To receive one of their children To bring him out again unharmed To reanimate him with their heat To revive them To live as…

She’s heard that apples go silver in moonlight, That the lavender cloud Of phlox along the wall Is absorbed by rocks, and that even The steady, village church is eaten away On a night like this. They told her when the moon shines Through a stained-glass window, there are no Reds or blues crossing the…

The silence of the Bionassay with its uneven glitter, blue-gray knife sculpting the mountain as when I whittle at distances so that they meet the eye, at light, a possibility towards which a single leaf unfolds. Beyond the timberline where silence enters the skin and jangles the small nerves of the teeth, the mountain glistens…

Well, it finally happened. A monstrous monogamousness has finally overcome me. That is, the idea of devoting this body, even for an hour or two, to any other body but you seems not only immoral, but pointless and silly. What’s the good of it? That’s sensible enough, I suppose, but the degree of my devotion…

This is the kind of night on which Yuan Chen cried out to his dead wife: when one dreams of another, are both aware of it? the moonlight blackening his bed, the ice roaring in the great northern rivers of Honan. From such a night, to such discoverable likeness, Adam himself awoke, knowing none of…