Poetry

I am pregnant with my life. It will be red and immediate. It will have short fingers, very strong. Its eyes will grow later. To give birth to it at all I have to crack my skin, split up the spine, throw away my hair and my glazed mouth. Naked and the focus of lightning…

I      I think I’m lying. Surely one nation divided implies another sad device of history, when I might have said road into ourselves and seemed friendly. This country nags me like a bad excuse, these critical days away from myself demanding accounts, looking at the future in my wife’s sharp face. II      Rutledge, if I…

The squirrels are frantic in the branches; birds circle; the cat waits near the roots, wanting to strip the bark and grease the trunk. Here’s the news under the ground: the rain’s driving weeds through concrete; farmers are tying razors to worms to fish sprouts out of seeds. You’re eager too. Don’t your fists twitch…

I want to be mentioned more. I want to be able to be dramatic: a sculptured Renaissance mouth fifteen feet high. I want all the pistol fingers. I want to drive up in a Bentley as big as a boat. I’d like somebody to see to this pretty quickly.

You don’t sleep in the house that stands for happiness. You dance to the music of its cracks, flexing your lonely muscles like a priest, pretending your body is a ghost come to haunty yourself. The closets, with luck, remember you as moths or shelves & kiss your open mouth with years that taste like…

I’m tired in my hands from tearing at walls and my feet are bored with kicking, but the head stays open and empty. Some dream crowbars and files, steel fists and paper parapets, the night watch blind in the searchlights, but if the doors opened they’d root in the stone like ivy; they’d lock themselves…

There is a city block but the streets are canals but it’s not Venice and there are swans gliding around the corner I’m following this girl who has love-handles that really are handles she goes into a drugstore where an old woman in dark glasses and            powder blue Sunday clothes is dealing smack I…

Strindberg shouldered a cross and climbed two giant snow-covered breasts. In the crucible of his palms he said “Lead: turn into gold!” In a rooming house bed he felt the walls closing in, the roses plotting against him. And something else Strindberg did — when he drank pernod or anise, he watched a small child…

Tarzan refreshed. He completely emptied his mind for two minutes lying in underbrush; not even “rhinoceros” the word remained. His open hibernated eyes looked for snakes and other jungle effluvia. I’d settle for that power if I could also be handsome like a slightly chubby blonde folksinger. And my non-publisher likes my snide frivolous tone…