Poetry

For me it might be fine to wake up and weed the garden play tennis or lift a chair over my head but what about the man who moves pianos for a living or the woman who at last gives birth to one too many children what does she think of breakfast brought to her…

Having walked out in the storm and seen no end to it and nowhere to get to you watch the snow cover the ground cover itself cover everything that is not you it is a blinding fall from moment into moment the air sweeping away the air the cold turning your breath to stone no…

     A Letter to 102 Boulevard Haussmann Mon cher maître, could even you have mastered such dissemblance?            Given your gift for luring the accidental and the inevitable to lie down together, what would you have done with these disparities—could you have parsed them into a semblance of sense?                  Mind, that phoenix, Kindles its…

Time “at a premium as usual” and me drunk in the garden the birds bearing their perfected frames down the creekbed walking as straight as I can I only intersect myself Even the gardeners are drunk today their rakes fly out of their hands they hide their bottle in the hedge their pile of petals…

1. Our Inhaler At first I was suspicious, when in the heat of our getting into each other you would call for “Amy.” I wondered who it was you wanted, me or her. But when you kept coming back for both of us, I realized that losing you to her was also a way of…

I saw you on my way from shoes to sweaters coming down the other escalator in the gray suit we had bought together in Venice. It had been years, but its cut was still stylish; and your hair shone with the same ebony luster it had that summer. You didn’t see me, though I waved,…

     —for Ricardo Sternberg Shaped like a bureaucratic grin It floats Unseen Past the general’s head As he sits Studying an old newsreel of Peron’s exile. Even the palace guard Daydreaming About the young girl in the marketplace Thinks it only A phallics spectre Thrown up in the mind’s eye Like The curvaceous angel The boxer…

They leave from positions of strength, like all baroque civilizations; leave the statues we cannot imagine moving for heaviness caught in the skirts. . . We watch their gestures grow finer and more nervous in the widening air. They are the best judges of wine; talk always at the      glittering edges of things, the terrible…

for Helen Corsa All that is lost is the body and the object of desire. Approaching composition, the laureate said and resaid his name like the clack of British Railways: Tennyson, Tennyson-Tennyson, murmuring of innumerable be‘s—mere being, humiliating history. Heinreich Schliemann, final hero of Troy, once saw as a child a tombstone: “Here Lies Heinreich…