Aren’t we all, all of us? Coming from a world before time and dream, a place without time a place that does not exist into a world that does, of time and content. The clock starts with a slap, breath, an intake of our air, the colors of this world and first dreams of what’s…
You were dreaming again, of holding her in the failing light of some failing stop over or another, some merely broken down town with nothing operative but corruption. The sun like a cavity filling with blood on the western horizon made the ocean Pacific, the late afternoon dangerous in its willingness to reveal. Were you…
So when I think of you there is light. There is a window that disappears at night and returns at sunrise. There is the dust of us on the slant of incoming rays warming the rooms where we were, the many rooms, the dust of us blended, one sheath of light.
Here goes; and there it went. It might stay gone. What next? Play faster with the quick and dead, with the tightened fist play looser: amplify the beggar in the chooser. Cursed are we who lop the tops off trees to find heat’s name is written in the wood; cursed are we who know…
Genesis, behold your progeny: inventor, behold your inventory: protagonist, behold your agony: window, the wind is in your eye: Capuchin, here’s your cappuccino: tragedy, I’ve got your goat: and here I come O deathless mortgage, O unmanageable manifesto. Ready or not.
Yesterday P. asked: “Do you think the children from Job’s second chance could actually be happy?” – Anna Kamieńska, A Nest of Quiet: A notebook, translated by Clare Cavanagh But then amid the helplessness of Lives and corrugated sewage,…
To me moans came for food, my roars poured forth like drink. – John Berryman, “Job” “So why did my umbilicus, umbrella of the belly, not asphyxiate and fix me at my birth and make my due my expiration date? Why was I lapped in aprons, and…
Once, there were neither bottled-up fields nor bluebottled breeze; nor trill of pollen, tree nor hill to die on was there there (there, there): not yet our unseated adjustment of dust; no striking star, nor stroke of sun; nor did the moon light, like the grey, scaled nodule nodding off the dead end of a…
Let me explain to you mortals what an instinct is: the end of explanation. Settlements are where your belongings are dropped. Like gravity, there’s nothing under there. None of you go around asking gravity why it exists. Life wants, like gravity wants. * “Unlike the rest of you, I refuse to be governed by…
In theory, anything can be depicted. And what is? What, on the walls and floors and ceilings of theory, is depicted and not? Not in the lover’s light of retribution. Not in the poets’ utilitarian light. In the fat-and-fire-in-a-cup light. Artificial, if that’s what that means: light from other than the foot-wide sun….
Here we are. The baby needs changing. It’s early in a midweek, late summer day. The cool skepticism that blankets us all before the dew drops, before the dawn god rises reluctant from her bed, is a memory now, a feeling faded into thought. Strange hours those, empty of opinion. Strange feeling—so total then,…
How long all this will go on, the circulating blood—hauling, having its way with us, around us, skin-deep presence and us oblivious, blood that stays where it should until it doesn’t— how long its warming, halting, stock-taking, unremitting run between some bloodlike-before and, after, what then,…
