Taking Our Bearings To find out where we are, we gaze at the sunset, Then the moon and stars. We bring their images down to touch the sea, And there we are: there, At a certain time where straight lines intersect On a chart––that’s you and I In all this emptiness, the only two In […]
Poetry
The World Might Change
It is Marvellous to Wake up Together It is marvellous to wake up together At the same minute; marvellous to hear The rain begin suddenly all over the roof, To feel the air suddenly clear As if electricity had passed through it From a black mesh of wires in the sky. All over the roof […]
Wing, Fin, Flake
Wind Gift For you, something not put even in prayer. Like broad wings that swim thick under your fall And won’t let you drop through the air. Or the same thing under the sea where your boat goes. A teeming companionship of life too full for a hollow —the way a canyon’s alive when it […]
The Ones Who Have Left
Lost Friends Friends carried off by life are the most difficult to appease, the most tyrannical. Barbarians of an unknown land, they sip the poison of silence and they grow beyond all limits in the distance, a blind eye to our loneliness. And to think that we were brothers in arms, that we dug up […]
Walk That Road Blazing
Fuchsia That summer in the west I walked sunrise to dusk, narrow twisted highways without shoulders, low stone walls on both sides. Hedgerows of fuchsia hemmed me in, the tropical plant now wild, centuries after nobles imported it for their gardens. And I was unafraid, did not cross to the outsides of curves, did not […]
- Creativity
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Going to the Mat To Move Someone
It keeps happening. I keep finding parallels in visual art with the way poets and writers talk about their process. While most art makers have their own “narrative” of what is going on and how their work comes into being that could be questioned as a kind of handy fiction all its own, I still […]
Dean Young: The Heart Hoards Its Thorns
Poem Without Forgiveness The husband wants to be taken back into the family after behaving terribly, but nothing can be taken back, not the leaves by the trees, the rain by the clouds. You want to take back the ugly thing you said, but some shrapnel remains in the wound, some mud. Night after night […]
Boland and Van Eyck
Domestic Interior The woman is as round as the new ring ambering her finger. The mirror weds her. She has long since been bedded. There is about it all a quiet search for attention, like the unexpected shine of a despised utensil. The oils, the varnishes, the cracked light, the worm of permanence–– all of […]
Count Me Among the Living
The Origin of what happened is not in language— of this much I am certain. Six degrees south, six east— and you have it: the bird with the blue feathers, the brown bird— same white breasts, same scaly ankles. The waves between us— house light and transform motion into the harboring of sounds in language.— […]
Ode to Weather
After Paradise Don’t run any more. Quiet. How softly it rains On the roofs of the city. How perfect All things are. Now, for the two of you Waking up in a royal bed by a garret window. For a man and a woman. For one plant divided Into masculine and feminine which longed for […]