Poetry

He hid the fire in a tall hollow stalk of fennel, out of the sight of the great one who delights in thunder. —Hesiod, Works and Days   In those mountains he met others walking in the same direction. Backpacks, black plastic garbage bags, food sacks, a girl with two hard-boiled eggs, the shells flaking

you are cooperative you are educated sing arias at home you nod meaning yes and lift up your shirt to show the center of your torso is as hairless and innocent as the day you were born which of course you do not remember but at this point the air and warm light that touches

i. everyone wants                        a virgin to hunt a field              to watch           for wings or hind legs something exotic                     something everyone aches for velvet meat see the savage beast                 a haunting twitch of his brown eye sullen               his teased sway                        he’s asking for it jeans gathered at his pelvic chin & white t-shirt  a

First off, you’re in an off-duty cabbie’s Chevy. In the front seat. A fogbound field is boundary. Through a windshield, night hovers. He’s said that that bus doesn’t run anymore, but he’ll get you there. He’s failed, he says, to make clear the fare for the thirty-mile trip. Seems not to care this is your first full

Notation’s just part of the story, I know but it matters if you carved the heart/arrow/name before the first kiss or soon after if you kissed her or she kissed you either way a hasty abbreviation— the leaf-carpet crackled, footsteps coming this way • Later, erasure— crossed out in a flash, love scraped away fast

My crotch is a mound of pounding hell & there’s nothing I can do about it. I’d like to be where Monistat grows on trees, yeast is for beer & cottage cheese is what you eat. But, I’m on deployment in Iraq. I thought someone gave me something horrible, my sisters set me straight. Hordes

like a red and empty shirt pinned wet to a clothesline my mother only seventeen trembles as she hands her father her belt knowing its buckle will bite the brown and black off her back and leave broken skin and bruises the color and size of jocotes en miel her knees sink as they had

Translated, from the German, by Stuart Friebert     KARL  KROLOW (1915-1999) Krolow’s large body of work – thousands of signature poems (3 volumes of Selected Poems!), haunting prose, criticism of the highest caliber, and sublime translations, from the Spanish & English, all charting a major direction for German literature — will endure as long

Translated, from the Swiss German, by Stuart Friebert       KUNO  RAEBER (1922-1992) This Swiss writer’s considerable body of work – whose spare poems weigh tons, whose novels & stories, radio plays, essays, translations and reviews have left an indelible mark on European literature that is just becoming clearer & clearer – is now

In a high wind, trees lacking leaves spill open Vowels void themselves Pity and fear subside into stones Sentences are purged. On a footpath where a rajah strolls A woman’s voice sucks commas into a nest That clings to a tree with no bark What If He Doesn’t Want You At All?— A sixties jingle,

She admits she is haunted, but does so softly, as if she really believes spirits will overhear her, spirits that neither she nor I believe in. I’m haunted, too, but standing before a window, its glass all that separates us, keeps us safe from the spirits we could never imagine swirling upward like protoplasmic spectral

Something falls silent the night we return from the chariot festival to celebrate Lord Jagganath; the last time I’ll come home with the face of a flushed and happy six year old just back from a street fair, the smell of cigarette smoke and sweaty crowds pressed on my flesh like perfume when pushing my

Soul perception earth damped, smell of flowers; sage, cedar, mugwort. Semblance shatters obsidian mirrors. Sky red dawn in songs and stories are indestructible. Five pointed star. Atop earthen dome willow reeds: sixteen mystery lodge Lakota songs last forever. Only know what one has breathed.      

Like the others, her thoughts are a graffiti of spontaneous phrases & lines. Four walls of clipped & looped words left by hands in haste. One door, no windows, the only light a hanging bare bulb. I’m in hell help me Above this reads One word in a hand is worth more than six behind

I watched from a window as kids careened through the yard, playing games whose rules I didn’t get. Parents stood around in knots of conversation, drinking beer from the cooler, or wine in plastic cups. Potato chips were crushed into the lawn. Was it July 4th? I was helping my friend in the kitchen— slicing

She got sick even though the moon is supposedly everyone’s nightlight. I thought, Nessun dorma. My heart banged down the stairs like an anvil. The sex in Venice tore open the curtains before dawn. Against your abdomen, my pelvis feels like a crucible. Say anything serious like chemo and I’ll respond with the follow up:

Black in a black mirror— the glass panther. Even if you do not dream— the glass panther. On top of the Philco radio, in front of the rabbit ears— the glass panther. The credenza, the barcalounger, the Formica table, the orange vinyl barstool, the chrome bar caddy, matching martini shaker, the Sputnik lamp— the glass

I don’t know how I figured out about those pills. Maybe I asked her. Maybe she thought it was best to be honest. Or maybe she didn’t say a word and neither did I. I didn’t take one every day. Only once in a while I went to her bathroom casually, as if I might

take     the nearest     last     off to the left     stage     show     over a marked     door     line visitor     handler     exhibit with animal     guarded     the barred banned     with child     without all of them     gatherers     gathered or some of them     citizens     justices unfit     excluded     except closed     no     or into the open air     the way     out     will not be     the

Here all the boughs belong to the dead,they wave the boughs persistently in the wind;do their young eyes still live in the photo albums,I don’t know, they left the uniforms behind,the wedding gowns, the first communion clothes,naked they slither between the boughs;is there a place to graze or picnic at God’s, I don’t know; I

Growing into loneliness, even her bike won’t help, her shiny mountain bike. Growing into the emptiness behind the windowsill, sudden precipice; growing into herself and from herself, in-between she won’t find anything, won’t find a willing one to search together – she doesn’t know that yet, for now she walks her bike and strokes it,

Ice-bound, folded; internal rhyme of the earth; is silent next to a stone, maybe shy; not a stream nor living vein under the ice,  he is like mercury, quicksilver tear, a plaster cast of dislocated space; the women’s furs walking sway the church. 1In Polish Krynica is a famous city with natural springs and the

He couldn’t kill anyone but himself, and even that he couldn’t do. He lay in the hospital bed after his suicide, and heard someone dying several beds away. Her screams from a darkness no one wanted to hear, for she was afraid to die. He remembered the body bags televised on the tarmac about to

Marilyn Monroe caresses the ailing rodeo rider  who leans against her polka dots outside the Dayton Bar in Nevada, those polka dots  all over her dress, like mumps, and the car door open where they both share the same close-up.  The misfits broken up inside and out, Montgomery no longer the pretty boy— his scars

I drove all this way, but all I want to do is drive away again. All the words in Scrabble are as inadequate. Still, I keep score– 15 years to go 1 minor text message sent — because tally marks our progress. Walls, floors, ceilings, folding tables and chairs, guards and vending machines: it all

I have three hours a week, give or take a few years, to lean back on the stiff leather recliner and stare out the window at the approaching fall. It is Florida and the oaks’ leaves rust only slightly at the corners, drop to the ground halfheartedly, go through the motions of autumn, the angled

1 On old Highway 20 the rides were rare. Yellowthunder’s dense eyes followed from foot to hill the split that broke along the bank of clouds where trucks blew past and excited the dust and grass.  In Yellowthunder the sky huddled its light like a fallen bird. This July Fourth he hitched a morning ride

This, it may be, is one way
That the interstices
Of sound and thought and feeling

After Hildegard of Bingen   We fill our eyes when they are closed. We dig our fingers into the crevices of the flamed grain of the oak table in search of crumbs and pebbles of sand nested there. We hear the songs that come from these nests, clear and crisp as Ordo Virtutum, a music

A bride is not mouth and finger; she is not footfalls and keys nor smolder nor the fortress of tulle and feather, not tongue, not an amnesiac, nor a ringed exit; she is not a laughing kitchen of oil and milk, nor a funeral nor bracelets and hairpins, she is not the quiver and the

I attempt a visual representation of how my daughter and I interrelate. I choose pronouns as the unit of my expressions, a circle as their container.

Multimedia

K— breaks her hand then takes up painting.
She uses the broken hand as lever and her other hand as guide.

Dust on my Whitman. A list of achievements for my weekend shipwreck. We got you. Your Life: The Popular Guide to Desirable Living. Illustrated lectures in the art of human relations. Social moochers snacking on the big fish. The wayward mail order sweetheart. Neither does he. More noise, confusion, radio static. First aid and your

Gravity forgives the words to plug
sun spots. Rust cups
inside us, touching what

Trees branch under water
Yes nests inside the yes
breathes, triangulates, bivalves

A flash of birds across the Erbil sky dissolves, dissipates and vanishes into the desert sun – a discreet instability, impulsive and determined. None that I can name except to say I have not seen them in my hometown whose birds I all know: Red Breasted Demagogue, Grime Throated Mission Creeper, Razor Beaked Oblivion. When

Mass Ave on a gray dusk black wet street shine asphalt sometimes sliced, sometimes spongey dark flesh hurled to the earth tied like a tourniquet hurled to it and swallowed by the rain. Your magic will be better than their magic Spicer was thinking of you. Early streetlights are the sun’s cribsheet. the sun, anachronistic

for Stuart Greenhouse It might be true that cannibalism makes the greatest affront to verisimilitude. The made thing cowers before the consumer. Michael Rockefeller likely imagined his long houses as part of natural history, as conquered as the informative always is, emblematic of the heaven that is praised and reserving the heaven that is made;

I recoil from the whipping wind, crouch
fetally beside the table against the retaining
wall to wait for the next rumbling of earth.

All rules break. All loves go belly up.

As flowers in the bathtub
Trees on the subway
A garden in a closet

*   Disgrace is not random                                                                       but magnified   Diapers are for babies                                                                        and grown-ups   A baffled mind                                                                         is indicative of love   Apologies are often                                                                screaming       *     I was afraid. Because I was afraid. all because I was afraid.         Pie eating contests                                                                  are not

I will séance America into a love
Even the Supremes will be afraid of.

a radio play in ‘talking sonnets’

Stalk:Sorry. Once the dirt loved me, held me tight Anyone hear? I’ve grown colorless transparent trying to trace how. Once there was a pattern, I’m sure of it I remember feeling succulent My neighbors— rose and blue flourishes Communion My fruit hung like jewelry heavy gold treasure What I would give Already have Dirt nods

such     switches switch after switch such afters such is the     nature of such itch such niches such fuss such touch   such switches   his blue eyes by the door you knew your way you took no sounds any fool would have asked your name as if thinking blackens our path i left i am

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life

A musical adaptation by Michael Heyman and Regie Gibson of a 16th-century text written by Tenali Ramalinga.

My haminne, my great-grandmother
hums as she cut the noodles
into smaller and smaller pieces

Where the sun
The cedars
A shadow on the slope

It is a mystery; I cannot fathom it.
It mixes light and darkness: in the dark,

five my father hears the island language no one but he can understand, moon sound
birthed as pearls

Against these walls, too thin, a
wooden giant leans. In dimness
we mistake it for a coffin, or chrysalis.
We rock myths in the cradle.

Translated by Bruce Weigl and Nguyen Ba Chung

Discover me, find me,
as my woven ends
unravel in your hands,

Her portable garden escapes the terry gym towel.
Unweeded gladiola shoulders.
Arms with petal trails.

One can buy someone’s bairn,
collect a kidney or chew a cherry.

Their gestures in the eye of day, as day
Dives down on city square, on booth, and hay

Why now?
These byways inevitably
find one un-branching road below

Inside the tent with my mother
the women are wailing:

I stole a watermelon from your kitchen. I must have been about 18.
I’m thinking of a black-eyed angel.

You opened your eyes and considered the objects in the room. The cup and the pants-hanger on the table.

I lose my place in the sound
A splendid, fleeting trace in the sound

A dog whose bark mimics a beeper implies nothing
to another dog whose voice moves like a fax machine.

Your sneakered feet shade the limp-petalled lilies, ferns burned brown in their pots. Crouched on the glass roof, you hug your knees, hiding from Father, who enters like an angry god to grant water from a cracked green can. Mottled pansies droop in a row, purple as your mother’s eye, bright as the knife you

True, the first time I went willingly. What girl
could resist his leather pants

They call it kite fever, kite madness, gangs of kite looting children

hoarding bright acid kites, darting through rows of kite kiosks,

My mother(land) wants
to abort me
after I have
learned to walk.

after Solange Knowles   i am steeped in hunger & you are a dinner of bones. above us the moon could get full like a plate, but certain ephemera such as the Galileo telescope has been put away & so, how to name what we feel, is lost on us. epoch of Vulcans. the neighbor’s

spent of fuel, they detach and fall away

—Brian Ross, “Perigee”

Translated by Michael M. Naydan   You always approached this with suspicion Mary But here the udder of his heart flows with the milk of pain And you  sitting beside him there all night in the wind and rain feel how your skin becomes burned with the rust of doubt You carefully look at the

Of all the things it could be how come
The entry code to the building I live in the green door at No. 37