Each old thing in its new place must prove its worth yet again. Dust is disturbed, having made itself at home among what former tenants have found wanting. A friend brings a gift to brighten my room then leaves a cruel word to move in with me. Good and bad don’t always line…
Figs are sweet, but don’t last long. They spoil fast in transit, says the shopkeeper. Like kisses, adds his wife, a hunched old woman with bright eyes. Translated by Clare Cavanagh
Good government, Buon Governo, and the good judge — we see how Siena thrives under the just ruler. Peace reigns over all, revealed. The peasants work serenely, grapes swell with pride, a wedding party dances in the street. But bad government sets out to torment justice, who bears the lovely name Iustitia, it…
Let’s try to imagine it: a little like old Tolstoy he strolls the fields of Picardy, where funny tanks once clumsily defeated the terrain’s slight elevation. He visits the town where Bruno Schulz died or sits on a riverbank above the Vistula’s dim water, a meadow scented with warm dandelions, burdocks, and…
And then when you entered the empty garage a trumpet called as in the Fifth Symphony And it suddenly grew clear that there is joy and death and mad flies that circle the table where all of you sat just moments ago calmly chatting
The old painter stands by the studio window, where his brushes and colors lie. Poets wait for inspiration, but objects and faces assault the painter, they arrive shrieking. Their contours, though, have blurred and faded. Objects turn blind, mute. The old painter feels only a dim wave of light, a longing for…
You like to read biographies of poets You rummage through another life That sudden shock of entering another life’s dark forest But you may leave at any moment for the street or the park or from a balcony at night you may gaze at stars belonging to no one stars that wound like knives without…
Strictly for the birds. – Holden Caulfield Easy to think of what’s different, what’s broken or chastened somehow now that I’ve lived longer than my father ever did. No nightlights back then, for example, those steady little stars we plant and grow about the house now like nightflowers to make us…
Pride comes before a fall, Solomon says, but any fool knows that’s not true. Take Jesus, for example, or Gump Jaworski, who did a double half gainer and most of a triple solchow on his last day of working for Gutters ‘R’ Us (“Gutter Problems? Gutter Call Us!”) when he fell off a company ladder trying…
They say Lady Godiva put everything she had on a horse, but what if the wager had grown from speculating whether everything on earth is always growing steadily, incrementally, or whether things are inevitably falling apart? The safe bet would be the latter, of course, the smart call. You’d have gravity on your side, that…
* * * The Earth, stuffed to the gills with burning coals and consuming itself from its birth bristling with folds that sharpen into peaks, sometimes of short hairs sometimes forming dark dense beards and hollowed out with giant cavities filled with restless water from which emerged the grand debris of its genesis…
* * * Over our heads masses are moving, whitish cottony, ghosts on the weather maps Windings, swirls, languid scrolls under the sting of the wind, wandering herds Floating bodies. Appearing. Disappearing. In our own image. We, more unstable than plants fixed to the ground or the fish sheltered in water…
