when the sun un-sets, and vanilla wakefulness is still somewhat subservient to sleep’s dirty kingdom? Well there I was, inside some sixteenth-century Padua and I watched agog as pretty maids in period underclothes scampered laughing down a palace’s back stairs; and on those stairs, wedged pressed against a wall between the ceiling and the floor,…
that once cool and heavy egg that would one day have hatched a clever goose of gold. I cooked it in a pan until it smelted from a hard into a runny yolk, and then I promptly drank the molten yellow, gulped it down and felt it start to burn away my tongue and gums…
The deer has the eyes of a deer in headlights. I must have them too, sitting in the car, driving. The deer came out of nowhere. It is magic. It’s the kind of magic you wish wouldn’t happen. The deer must be thinking the same about me. The road came out of nowhere, this man…
as though the ocean swept it away like a sand dune. If I pretend there was no restaurant then I never saw your glossy eyes, where the old man who’d sit at the counter each day said I can tell he’s a pervert. Just look at his eyes. But if there was no restaurant then…
It was as if I were trying to climb into its eyes or mouth, the animal that inhabited me, as if I could take myself by surprise and thereby rid myself of the thing that bothered me. My zoo was open. It was supplied with creatures that might be exhibited without an entrance fee or…
I don’t know what to do with beauty, with the curled lip, with the delicate bones and the cocked wrist, with that sudden sense of being hurled into a place I have no right to be, as if to exist on such ground might be forbidden, allowed only a glimpse, then what to do with…
The dog wagged her tail outside the window, as I stared into her one good eye, wondering if she understood why she was banished outside (I didn’t), then I decamped to the yellow kitchen, where red flowers spread out of a vase like the five points of a star (though scruffier), and I read poems…
Our dead will not congregate but come to us, distinctly, as they were: her stooped majesty, his cold dreamy self, that darling girl’s sly smile, which could be why, when I have them meet in heaven or here at night in my room, they make absolutely clear in the way they don’t open their mouths…
for Eugene Dubnov Dead passion, like pain, is only a name, Word never to be made flesh again, Never again desire’s uncontrollable purge of the censoring brain. Nothing left, nothing left but language. Like the four-leaf clover shut fifty years in a dusty book on a shelf. Open the book. Such a dry clover!…
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