I have been eating poetry.
The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.
The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.
Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.
She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.
I am a new man,
I snarl at her and bark,
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.
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,…
Beyond our power to imagine, something neverthelessIn which we might see ourselves; and this desireCame always in passing, in waning light, and in such coldThat ice on the valley’s lakes cracked and rolled,And blowing snow covered what earth we saw,And scenes from the past, when they surfaced again,Looked not as they had, but ghostly and…
Among the hooded, shoving crowds, by steaming rocksAnd rows of ruined huts half buried in the muck;Then to the great court with its marble yardWhose emptiness gave him the creeps, and to sit thereIn the sunken silence of the place and speakOf what he had lost, what he still possessed of his loss,And, then, pulling…
of each other, and we have welcomed griefand called ruin the impossible habit to break.And now we are here.The dinner is ready and we cannot eat.The meat sits in the white lake of its dish.The wine waits.Coming to thishas its rewards: nothing is promised, nothing is taken away.We have no heart or saving grace,no place…
that I stand on one leg while the other one dreams,that this is the only way,that the lies I tell them are differentfrom the lies I tell myself,that by being both here and beyondI am becoming a horizon,that as the sun rises and sets I know my place,that breath is what saves me,that even the…
in the brim of my father’s hatas he walks on the gravel.In the garden suspended in timemy mother sits in a redwood chair:light fills the sky,the folds of her dress,the roses tangled beside her.And when my father bendsto whisper in her ear,when they rise to leaveand the swallows dartand the moon and starshave drifted off…
