Poetry

as though the ocean swept it away like a sand dune.If I pretend there was no restaurant then I neversaw your glossy eyes, where the old manwho’d sit at the counter each daysaid I can tell he’s a pervert. Just look at his eyes.But if there was no restaurant then there was no old manand…

It was as if I were trying to climb into its eyesor 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 creaturesthat might be exhibited without an entrance fee or license because I had…

I don’t know what to do with beauty, with the curledlip, 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 existon such ground might be forbidden, allowedonly a glimpse, then what to do with it? We have missed…

The dog wagged her tailoutside the window, as Istared into her one good eye,wondering if she understoodwhy she was banished outside(I didn’t), then I decampedto the yellow kitchen, wherered flowers spread out of a vaselike the five points of a star(though scruffier), and I readpoems and listened to jazz,wishing I could fly, butthe ground is…

Our dead will not congregatebut 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 meetin heaven or here at night in my room,they make absolutely clearin the way they don’t open their mouthstheir disdain at my—what is it—it’s my hopethat…

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! Smiles? Tears?           Not for her, not for him;Only for…

Here,the lichens are blue-greenlike copper silicates,and everything is horizontalin the gales that lastfor three days. With this isolationit’s a near-certaintyI can cobble togethera second creaturein my new laboratorybeneath the aurora. I dreamt last nightof an apothecary’s rosewhere the heart was,and when I wokeand saw the sunstrike a white-rising lark I felt such awe and eerinessI…

Nuns have broughtkneaded dough into the chapelwhere it rises without a draught silence brimswith this creature of bread,the smell of yeast against stone while outside,the perfect accidentof corn ripening the light.

My death grew along the edge of the yard. I’d crawl into her temple of plummet and root and once inside her heart it was hard to leave. I’d grow drowsy in the odor of her resin. Crushing the berries, I’d smell my fingers: they smelled of calamine and vomit. Through the roof of the…