The person sitting there stares at the waxen glow.The wind moves the air around, repeatedly,As if to clear a space. ‘A space for me,’ he thinks.He’s always been drawn to the weather of leavetaking,Arranging itself so that grief – even the most intimate –Might be read from a distance. A long shelf of cloudHangs above…
2 If a man lives with a poem,he shall die lonely.3 If a man lives with two poems,he shall be unfaithful to one.4 If a man conceives of a poem,he shall have one less child.5 If a man conceives of two poems,he shall have two children less.6 If a man wears a crown on his…
At night I turn back the clocks;I open the family album and look at myself as a boy.What good does it do? The hours have done their job.I say my own name. I say goodbye.The words follow each other downwind.I love my wife but send her away.My parents rise out of their thronesinto the milky…
The certain voice telling us over and overThat nothing would change,And remembering too,Because by then it will all be done with, the wayThings were, and how we had wasted time as thoughThere was nothing to do,When, in a flashThe weather turned, and the lofty air becameUnbearably heavy, the wind strikingly dumbAnd our cities like ash,And…
Are perishable in twilight, just like us. So they work all nightIn rooms that are cold and webbed with the moon’s light;Sometimes, during the day, they lean on their cars,And stare into the blistering valley, glassy and golden,But mainly they sit, hunched in the dark, feet on the floor,Hands on the table, shirts with a…
of field.This isalways the case.Wherever I amI am what is missing.When I walkI part the airand alwaysthe air moves into fill the spaceswhere my body’s been.We all have reasonsfor moving.I moveto keep things whole.
and the asphalt shingles on the roof have peeled or fallen off,where tiers of oxeye daisies float on a sea of grass?That’s the place to begin.Enter the kingdom of rot,smell the damp plaster, step over the shattered glass,the pockets of dust, the rags, the soiled remains of a mattress,look at the rusted stove and sink,…
when out of the blue a man and a camelhappened by. Neither uttered a soundat first, but as they drifted up the streetand out of town the two of them began to sing.Yet what they sang is still a mystery to me—the words were indistinct and the tunetoo ornamental to recall. Into the desertthey went…
only the patience of water, the boredom of stone.You think that silence is the extra page,you think that nothing is good or bad, not eventhe darkness that fills the house while you sit watchingit happen. You’ve seen it happen before. Your friendsmove past the window, their faces soiled with regret.You want to wave but cannot…
