-
Degrees of Difficulty
Descending December December whose guts got it bad Bad more or less measurable by degrees Degrees not necessarily historic Historic tinges of sadness Sad statues stud the park Park means kissing or maybe more More kleenex stuck to yellow lines in parking lot Lots of hysterics history washes away Away in a manger leave the heater running Running away from how sickly seem all growing […]
-
A Tomb for Paul Bray
The witches and nymphs are weeping in the Primal Forest, and all of the trees are throwing down their leaves. So we would like to believe. But of this we are certain: the channeller is gone. No more sinewy rhymes and meters straining against the boundaries, seeking to take flight. Syntax and lexicon may groan […]
-
Tallgrass
Here in sectioned dirt, rituals of attempted revival. I carry her face, projected on the earth, yielding and new. The quails tattered by the dreamy-eyed tomcat, the paint pony who snapped his own neck, frantic and cleaving. A dirge in duplicate; your love slick and refracted. Her ruined blood in mine, the only holy thing.
-
Class Flower
Click the image for a full view.
-
from T.’s Alphabet
“The sounds which I hear with the consent and coincidence of all my senses, these are significant and musical.” “Heard a blue bird in the woods about a week ago.” —Henry David Thoreau more now of pastures juniper knee-like wind yellow almost bound myriad nervous objectless points receive sky the unconsumed visual wound as bare clouds […]
-
Diagnosis
1 Unearned noon: sunned dishes, dinner’s remnants. Caducity of memory. Made much of: one I once was who’d never ever hurt a fly. Now, I watch each fly spiral, swatter readied in my hand. 2 Each act a fact tricked into frictionlessness. Bland rictus of faces: overworked, abstracted. Evidence subtracted from the sum of a […]
-
The Second Life of Montale, or A Rancor Less Bitter
The Collected Poems of Eugenio Montale 1925-1977 Translated by William Arrowsmith edited by Rosanna Warren Norton, 2012 Montale’s Collected Poems in this Norton edition is 790 pages, 656 pages of poetry. With the Italian en face, one might prefer that each poem have a page to itself—but think of the trees. It includes Cuttlefish Bones, […]
