Poetry

I. Invocation It’s crazy to think one could describe them— Calling on reason, fantasy, memory, eyes and ears— As though they were all alike any more Than sweeps, opticians, poets or masseurs. Moreover, they are for more than one reason Difficult to speak of seriously and freely, And I have never (even this is difficult…

How much too eloquent are the songs we sing. nothing we tell will tell how beautiful is the body. It does not belong even to him or her who lives in it. Beautiful the snail’s body which it bears laboriously in its way through the long garden. The old lady who lives next door has…

Urn that my aunt carried through Brazil with the ashes of her love turned pure mixed with the black dress the white apron the dark lips crystal urn sidesaddle urn sand urn eighteenth century urn urn wet with big tears and rain from the road crude urn carved by Andrade passion without peace or      letup…

I listen at the door. Who’s dying, then? It’s like bird-watching. Who’s going to die next? Birds in the nest. Who knows about all this?

There was in the corner of the living room an album of      unbearable photos, many meters high and infinite minutes old, over which everyone leaned in the joy of mocking the dead in frock coats. A worm began to chew the indifferent frock coats and chew the pages, the inscriptions and even the dust of…

“It is a beauteous evening, calm and free” My child and I Are walking around the block. No sea heaves near. No anger Blooms through the perfect sky. The flashing of the wheels Of a passing car is not The flashing of that fate I might have feared, not this Sunday. A page from a…

I make an elephant from the little I have. Wood from old furniture holds him up, and I fill him with cotton, silk, and sweetness. Glue keeps his heavy ears in place. His rolled-up trunk is the happiest part of his architecture. But there are also his tusks made of that rare material I cannot…

I read the brown sentences of my great-grandfather, As if—not even as if—but actually Looking into a brown photograph as old As his writing is. In his sentences Two innocent naked young men, Methodists, Bathe in the morning in the Rapahannock River. Fredericksburg, Virginia, Eighteen Sixty-Four. Brother Pierson and I went out and bathed in…

“I was Latin, born to a noble Tuscan; Guiglielm Aldobrandesco was my father, though you, perhaps, have never heard his name.      The gallant deeds and antique pedigree of my forebears fostered an insolence so great that I ignored our common mother      and held all men in scorn, persisting till I died of it—as know the…