Poetry

Energy

     In 1593 Calingicus Wrote a tract on the mortality of birds. I do not desire to point out how much error Traces his diagrammatic sureness, only To say he saw the species at a new angle, Being somehow reminded in their motion Not of the dilated freedom we live in But of the tight chain…

Images

I “Once I saw them execute a twelve-year-old girl. A beggar picked up her head and ran around with it shoving it in the faces of people who wouldn’t give him a coin.” II heads stacked in pails like tomatoes a vast soft haystack sea of women’s hair bodies white as corn doing their strange…

Ten Notes to M–

You are asleep. The ward is quiet so I slip into your room disguised as a brain surgeon. I take your pulse. We sip the stale water. I take your pulse. This is why I write to you, this is how I began to love you: I saw you on television. I enjoyed your lecture…

Contributor’s Note

She thought I was too old or too knowing. Her glance fixed on John and grew soft. That afternoon at Montmartre I lost them altogether though I knew who it was kissing hotly in the shade. I writhed all night recalling how her eyes switched on as she spoke of stepping out of her black…

Linwood Place in Snow 2/9/69 2-2:15 pm

(for Larry Eigner of Lynn) outside the window            the Japanese pine is bentheavy w/snow      & the yellow commune-house looks lk/somewherelse here in #2 i’m sackedout on the offthesidewalk couch            brought from the old house & the house before. it’s quiet. the Salvation Army is quiet even on Sunday,            the heads in the…

Vacations

An open shell, Two bone breasts In my sand hand. You next to me, Lobster red, Wild-eyed, embarrassed, Your claws empty, Our minds picked clean by the sun. And the next day our boat went down, Gulls laughing like tourists. Friends, old spongers, dropped by, Lead-headed divers, Squat gas pumps, worry Spinning in their amber…

The Haitian Campaign

     And so was I, the camera, instructed to pan the island’s landscape, to zoom toward its capitol city. My body snapped, reclattered and shuttered to the rapid rhythm of spent flash bulbs which left purple wisps of (MGM Exploits Standard Fruit) glassy smoke across the skies of the Northern Province. Typhoid babies sucked death while…

Death Dreams

My hand falling As if to reach under it. My black thumb, black tongue, Tasting the tear of the moth wing.      The milk skim of my eye torn,      The thorned leg of the locust      Probing the pin of oil,      My last seeing. Knees unbending Like the last wave of ocean, Sheet of sky settling.      A…