Poetry

Think back with a shovel, bend, do that. Who’s breathing through these tubes now? So this is how you plant trees in Scotland all afternoon. We take instruction. The translucence of it. Each plastic cylinder the exact shade of a stem tall and suddenly wide, slipped over sapling after sapling sunk into earth, tied, staked…

from The Poem Under the Ground Having opened the manhole over the swallet Having dammed up the stream What is this odd sensation? Why do I feel more invisible Mere memory as I dip under the stone? How do I blind my way in and touch Bridge my way down with knees on one side…

The right words formed in my mind backlit by the hum of their origin yet even as they brightened into line I fell asleep inside them too tired to begin. If accident has design, then here it is— the gaps unfilled, no artifice. Is the door into the oak hard to find? No. It’s where…

After an hour it was clear there was nothing to say we didn’t both already know that couldn’t be said better in the act of lifting a fork of fish eggs to my mouth which is how we continued the exchange; a piece of rustic bread torn in two for your sea bass, a sip…

Breaking my fast with earth and stones, or worse, eating the masonry of old churches, the boulders of floods, you reminded me of my new copy of Études néantes I killed a fly with twenty-two years ago, how the nail in the wooden beam of my bedroom entered through the back cover, the index, the…

Remembering I hadn’t finished Cocteau’s L’Ange Heurtebise while on the edge of sleep and that the reason for this was down to how the living word lifting off the page transmigrates into wings of watered silk with which we reach into our dreams to carry on the fine conversation we’ve been having about one thing…

for Shin, born in Camp 14, North Korea   The smallness of men’s souls sickened you, especially your own. Yesterday, and all the yesterdays before that yesterday, executions at dawn. White hoods hid the heads. Ropes lashed the arms, piss wet the pants. You wondered how quickly the first one died while the other clung…

Because the foot fractures, because the body turns soft. Because      the mind says six miles nine miles twelve miles, and I haven’t run in weeks. Because another relationship is ended, I take two Advil,      and go to the movies. A retrospective; the sixtieth-anniversary print of This Is Cinerama, Lowell Thomas’ love note to technology      and…

Paula Modersohn-Becker to Rainer Maria Rilke 2 November 1908 Rainer, dear friend, you are mistaken. I am not a ghost. I am not a forlorn shade that follows you. It is your imagination, your guilt, your regret that conjures me. I have become the purest part of myself. Once, we spent so many nights together—…