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…
How deep is frost? I dig six inches deeper. That is deep enough. Why do you live in this fenced-in garden? I am the lord of the garden, the retainer of the gardener who makes his plans and mends his fences. What can’t get out is his business. Have you no friends? I emulate my…
1 You need the woman wearing blue to remind you of the future. Her body has the shape of it. You need the movement of a wrist turning in its sleeve capable unlocking air. The bone, the tool turning under the skin unlocking the skin. The bone, a mineral of light unlocking and you remember…
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