More on: poetry

From the Janus view of the Janiculum,                      a warren of restricted views. To one’s left, the Vatican. Across the river, the Jewish Ghetto                      created by an edict of a pope, “Since it is absurd and utterly…

If you come to this cold bowl with ladle in the moonlight and wish to strip the old self away, on a raw, clear night, some time go out alone, toward the end of the year, on a solitary road, limned by igneous fires, lit micas of snow, until you reach a pasture of cattle…

Like an old Victrola, its needle stuck   In the groove where the flamenco dancer Patters her firecracker feet to the floor,   Machine gun maracas, so the cicada Pays homage to its clattery muse,   She who pitied the flight of Tithonus Withering eternally through his dog days,   So the myth tells us,…

Coming into the kingdom I was like a man grown old in banishment, a creature of hearsay and habit, prayerless, porous, a survivor of myself. Coming into the kingdom I was like a man stealing into freedom when the tyrant dies, if freedom is freedom where there are no eyes to obstruct it, if the…

[John] Wheeler’s delayed-choice experiment is a variation on the classic (but not classical) two-slit experiment, which demonstrates the schizophrenic nature of quantum phenomena…. In the delayed-choice experiment, the experimenter decides whether to leave both slits open or to close one off after the electrons have already passed through the barrier—with the same results. The electrons…

I tell you it’s a bitch existence some Sundays and it’s no good pretending you don’t have to pretend, don’t have to hitch up those gluefutured nags Hope and Help and whip the sorry chariot of yourself toward whatever hell your heaven is on days like these. I tell you it takes some hunger heaven…

Love’s last urgency is earth and grief is all gravity and the long fall always back to earliest hours that exist nowhere but in one’s brain. From the hard-packed pile of old-mown grass, from boredom, from pain, a boy’s random slash unlocks a dark ardor of angry bees that link the trees and block his…

What became of the nice pagan girl I married? you complained one morning after I’d found my way to the church down the street and kept walking back every Sabbath. Over dinner you’d quiz me on the sermon, argue with the absent preacher, and me if I defended his BS. Maybe you resented any other…

But instead of pressing palms tight as I was taught, I cup one palm over the other— fingertips to wrists— before my belly. This is how I show God what I’m asking, how I direct God’s hands to dive into my husband’s gut where cancer harbors in the sea of his bladder— a dark hulk…

Some of the things I was not doing at the age of twenty-two: learning the Latin names of flowers (or even their English ones) living abroad recording music with the intensity & abandon you hear on every single cut of At Last! on which Riley Hampton’s orchestra’s a tame & obliging brook under storm-spew’d sheets…