Poetry

  • The Hypochondriac

    A lump in your groin. A burning in your discharge. You cannot quit the cigarettes or the entire nights spent refining the pointless game of billiards. Setting the smoke of drugs adrift on the afternoon light, you salvage up a time perhaps when spring made a car look great and mascaraed girls from the lunchroom…

  • Reality Principle

    Life was cheap in South America. Anything could happen there. That was one way. He was tired. That was another. So many of his erotic daydreams began that way. He’d lie in his bed and masturbate, usually just before he got up. Many of them had to do with the way they’d survive after an…

  • from Satires II, vi

    Oh my Sabine farm, when shall I see you, when again With old authors, with sleep and lazy hours Can I find sweet forgetfulness of painful life? Oh when will the beans (Pythagoras’ cousins!) lie close With the greens well oiled with fat bacon? Oh nights and feasts of the gods! when I and my…

  • Essay on Psychiatrists

    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…

  • Ellery Street

    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…

  • Wandering

    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…

  • A Version of Chancellorville

    General Slaughter declared that on the night after the terrific repulse of Burnside’s army at Fredericksburg, Stonewall Jackson had made the following suggestion: — “I am of the opinion that we ought to attack the enemy at once; And in order to avoid the confusion and mistakes so common in a night attack, I recommend…

  • Endings

    The leap from three adjectives to an object is impossible. The change was laughable though surprising in the 24 years between my first and second visit to you in Washington— the first rung of the ladder, the sharpest pencil line, far from my ABC’s at Potomic School, Miss Locke and Miss Gay. My arms reached…