For centuries, the air was full of witchesWhistling up chimneyson their spiky broomscackling or singing more sweetly than Circe,as they flew over rooftopsblessing & cursing theirkind.We banished & burned themmaking them smoke in the throat of god;we declared ourselves‘enlightened.’‘The dark age of horrors is past,’said my mother to me in 1952,seven years after our people…
because someday I may depart at whimand leave you desolate, abandoned, grim.If that’s the case, what use to be alive?In loving life you love what can’t survive:and if you grow too fond and lose your head,it’s all for nought-for someday you’ll be dead.Maintain a cool detachment through the years.Wear blinders, dear, put cotton in your…
in your forehead,Mama?Are youold?’Not old.But not soyoungthat I cannotseethe world contractingupon itself& the circleclosingat the end.As the furrowsin my browdeepen,I can seemyselfsinking backinto that childhoodstreetI walked alongwith my grandfather,thinking he was oldat sixty-threesince I was four,as you are fourto my forty.Forty yearsto takethe road out . . .Will another fortytake meback?Back to the streetI grew…
the chicken soup of sexwhich cures everything:tossed mane of noodles,bits of pale white meat.the globules of yellow fatlike love…But he is a man so sickno soup can save him.His throat has healed into a scar.Rage fills his guts.He wants to diet on dust.I offered to feed him(spoon by spoon)myself.I offered my belly as a bowl.I…
-Lorenzo di MediciIn the poplars’ lengthening shadows on this hill,amid the rows of marigolds and earth,and through the boxhedge labyrinth we walk,together, to the choiring twilight bells.Their fugue of echoes echoes through the hillsand sings against this time-streaked, flowering wallwhere breezes coax the potted lemon trees,the pendant, yellow fruit and shiny leaves.Beneath the flaming watercolor…
with its melancholy love songs crooningacross the rainy air above Verdun& the autobahn’s blue suicidal dawn.Wherever he lives there is the same unwomaned bed,the ashtrays overflowing their reproaches,his stained fingers on the tuning bar, fishingfor her voice in a deep mirrorless pond,for the tinsel & elusive fish(brighter than pennies in water & more wished upon)-the…
where the changing lightreminds me of my death& the fact that it need not be fatal-yet I perch herein the midst of the citywhere the traffic dulls my senses,where my ears scream at sirens,where transistor radio blastsinvade my poemslike alien war chants.But I never walkthe streets of New Yorkwithout hoping for the endof the world.How…
examine his downy fur & smellhis small paws for the scentof sulphur.Is he a child of hell?O clearly those soft brown eyesspeak volumesof deviltry.O surely those small pink teatscould suckle witches.O those floppy earshear only the devil’s hissing.O that small pink tonguewill lick & lick at your heartuntil only Satan mayslip in.A fuzzy white dog?Name…
They’re overdrawn on all accounts but hope& they’ve missed(for the hundredth time) the expressto the city of dreams& settled, sighing, for a desperate local;so who’s to blame themif they swim through swimming pools of twelve-year-old scotch, or fallin love with widows (other than their wives)who suddenly can’t ridein elevators? In that suburb of elms& crabgrass…
Books which are stitched up the center with coarse white threadBooks on the beach with sunglass-colored pagesBooks about food with pictures of weeping grapefruitsBooks about baking bread with browned cornersBooks about long-haired Frenchmen with uncut pagesBooks of erotic engravings with pages that stickBooks about inns whose stars have sputtered outBooks of illuminations surrounded by darknessBooks…
