Redeye that never sets, contrail bloody with eclipse we rock under: white bathrobe and nudity, damp seat, damn oarlock, fish ruching the black, the air filled with space, with cold, a plane so far above its rumble is weather crossing

ORACLES “Think as a mortal.” “Benefit yourself.” “Grieve for nobody.”   Gone, even the singing fountain, here between the goat carcass and the olive stump. We brought our questions here where there is no one, of course, to answer them.

End of the Century                       We’ve slept too long, and that hasn’t stopped the incidental warping— constellations crossing, new diamond-scratch on glass. Radio jumps off the bedstand.  No one can hear or see, as the Ramones hammer in the background

Instruction on Driving with an Orgasm   after Ignatow’s “The Driver” Look both ways before going out for a spin. And ease onto the road. Take careful note of the speed limit and oncoming traffic. Focus. In other words, don’t

Why is the sky so tall and over everything?   What you draw as a blue stripe high above a green stripe, white-interrupted, the real sky starts at the tip of each blade of grass and goes up, up, as

The time is naturally over. It is another morning. Lie Still, but declare the carpet of marigolds at your tongue, yours. Raise Your lips to the flock of sunlight at your door and tell yourself to Man Up.  There is

from The Book of Life   Shot   October 29, 1971   Don’t be distracted by the shot of Picasso, the flesh sagging its frame. No cubist, this body aged 90: the hands lively because they could still be. On

Undelivered letter from the Rev. Charles Smale to The Times, 1874   Sir – We have spent too long debating Darwin in these pages whose theories, after all, are not incompatible with God and His ever-unfolding map of history and

Hsia Yü   夏宇   Three Poems (Translated by Steve Bradbury)     Personal Life The universe is vast and boundless We greatly feared we were unsustainable And thus invented time Divine Personal life Time by chance was just all used

for Rachel For hours I’d lug her on my shoulder, up and down the sidewalk in front of that crumbling pre-war two-story where we lived under the tap shoes of a struggling hoofer. Up and down that sidewalk, stumbling over

I am walking along the dazzling ruin of a road I knew When I was fourteen, summer, and the days stretch out Like the road itself, or like that song about a road heading Somewhere far off into the unseen and the one

When I first knotted my hair against the coming of winter, I had grown tired of playing jacks and didn’t yet find boys of especial interest, unlike my older sister, who kept her thin hair down in the cold season