Poetry

for Yasi I too love small streets— those orphans who don’t want us to make a fuss over them but are delighted when a stranger shows up and walks through, by choice or chance. Big History is never there, though the residents often display a quiet dignity worthy of long years’ note. Birds always hop…

I have spent most of my life walking From one place to another not in the natural World but the built world of cities sometimes Going from one to another then zigzagging Around them street to street walking Everywhere I went not briskly but saunter Was my pace and my speed resembled the turtle’s Or…

Time is led by its interrogators into a round room with a domed glass ceiling. Ranged along the wall, strange numerals stand, mossy columns salvaged from some forgotten god’s temple. In the center of the room, on a small table, rest two black hands, cut off at the wrists, frozen in the pose of a…

Fog on everything. Mountains white. Few things more beautiful than a swollen brain lit by dye tracers, a flare opening the broken sections, filled with our history. My father tells me, “these things are hard to know parts you can damage and be fine.” Marbles I could pick out with my fingers, blue dye soaks…

I walked to the lake. I passed the Hooters, the Publix, the McDonald’s where I sometimes use the Internet to grade papers when my neighbor’s Internet is down. I passed the Wendy’s, and the Scottish Rites temple, whatever that is. When I got to the coffee shop, I ran into Vince and John and we…

What’s your whisper number, honey? Your point of roll- over or sell? Adrift you lumber, money pit and money doll, dispensing a sense of portly doom, exhaling a lost wherewithal. And yet you have advantages: too big to fail, you shake down squid—whole ecologies!—with stylish slaps of a trigger tail. What means ye by beaching,…

And didn’t I make you? Didn’t I shape the notes you bend your body round? Didn’t I tag your streets and cityscapes with hue? Even your style—which you think is yours— didn’t I hand it over, like something momma-made, big enough for you to grow into? My words in your mouth. The words you use…

To my young daughter, I sing the songs my mother sang to me. Which is to say: to my young daughter, I sing an eclectic selection of breakup tunes of the 1960s. Now I know you’re not the only starfish in the sea / If I never hear your name again, it’s all the same…

Translated from Slovenian by Michael Thomas Taren and the author The history of the growth of heaven is the motion of every eyelash on every born and unborn human face. No kitties, no trees, no herds of wild animals are excluded or forgotten. The history of the growth of heaven is the image of all…