More on: Poetry

Think of your parents before you. First children themselves, fourth graders when Kennedy was shot. Half of you inside your mother, even then. Months away from a first confession. Then meeting by chance in a drive-in parking lot, your future father mistaking your mother for some other girl with long black hair. And with one…

for Bronisław Anlen The stones are gathering And who was supposed to come Where there is stone upon stone it’s because they’re familiar Here a stone says kaddish with its weight its multitude and stones the place in the painless grass The stones are gathering Here sometimes an old man will lug inside him feldspar…

She had nothing but eyes she hadn’t yet grown into inside them quite by chance two stars of David that a tear might extinguish so she wept Her speech was not silver worth at least some spit a turn of the head her weeping speech full of hunchbacked words so she stopped speaking Her silence…

It’s probably right here out of the ripe moon rising that a pit fell once (because it isn’t just the moon’s other side we don’t know but also its pit) and that’s what started the apricot orchards outside Varna. Down sits the black-bearded gardener, God the father with the planets in his basket, and bites…

Americans are almost conscious of this fact often we shut consciousness down like closing a shop, pulling down the iron grate like putting up the keep-out signs What I mean by somewhere else is some other continent from which we traveled by boat or jet or desperate rail or bleeding feet And what I mean…

When we are born thirst makes us cry thirst surges through our arteries when the hormones hit when we start to wither our thirst necessarily increases for the tongue of touch the dictionary of rain we remember we were once loved love kept us alive * Then every face was like the face of God…

In the Shining Book it says Moses existed before he existed at first above in the spirit world and then among us like a light * child of the Blessed Holy One who is a man of war and child of the Blessed Holy One the glamorous moon divine mother and lover, this, this—light that…

The relation of a poem to time is as follows: a narrative poem travels along a stream creating white ruffles of water behind it swimming over rocks it arrives at the ocean and dies A lyric poem unlocks a door in the stream taking a deep breath it walks through the door into a big…

By dint of going wrong all will come right.                     —proverb ° Where outside the mind is this place like mind, unmappable, this un-, this ir-, this sub-? What coffin text— honeycombs, laurel sprigs, lyres, among syllabograms—chiseled here with ouroboros and zero glyphs for eternal reading…

Little monotony, crow come to my window, why start my day with your cracked, raucous notes? You know the kind of music you profess unasked for works its way into my bones, shakes me as only thunderheads’ bleak rain unsettles me, insisting on a correspondence. I have to reach far down into my distances, my…