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  • What is Unknown

    When I tell her I’ve fallen for What Is Unknown, my mother’s face brightens.  “She’ll be a good girlfriend for you,”

  • Bathroom Mirror

    Often, when dazzled by sunlight,

  • Virginia Woolf: Three Fragments (1910)

    i.How much must we carry with us? Must we bear the souls of errand boys, drovers, butchers in bloody smocks, the

  • Little Torch

    First there was delight, delight in the windchimes,

  • Ghosts

    The first time I saw him he was standing

  • SINGER | LOTUS CROSS-DRESS |

    If you’ve heard the cant of the auctioneer, the

  • Hostile Takeover

    Cheeks puffed, she’s looking up at a horizontal

  • Over the Bright and Darkened Lands | Out in the Tranquil Bay

    I sit in one of the dives.

  • Angles | Bad News

    The master speaks to a tree.

  • What is Grand

    Don’t mumble

  • Jerry Garcia in a Somerville Parking Lot

    Past midnight, a man in his late 60s, tall, with long

  • Bruised Fruit

    These sun-poached pages like an old address book

  • Without You

    I was doing just fine, a job, a home,

  • Door to Door

    He tooled around Long Island

  • Study: Old Watercolor and Joe

    I bought an old watercolor in a primitives shop and brought it home to my in-laws’ on summer vacation.

  • Soaked, by Marilyn Kallet

    At the friary lunch we chat about End of Days,

  • From the Ass’s Mouth: A Theory of the Leisure Class

    Up on stage in the three-quarters empty auditorium,

  • Green Girls

    Wriggling on the bottles:

  • Wait a Minute, It’s Simple

    As I chewed thoughtful fruit breakfast

  • The Night Dancers

    Praise the shadows that slither up candlelit walls

  • In a Room with Many Windows

    In a room with many windows

  • Your Beautiful Mouth

    The sun is the sum of one particular age, the moon

  • Ode to Fluffy | Poem for Engagement

    goodbye fluffy

  • Momin Khan Momin | Mirza Ghalib

    Momin Khan Momin

  • From a Bench at MOMA

    Don’t wanna, don’t wanna,

  • The Plum

    A teacher I loved

  • Vermeer in Greenlandic Norse

    We were stopped in the gallery’s cool

  • To Urania

    Astronomer who rules the tides and skies,

  • The Mercies of Noah’s Wife

    Among the most measly of beasts, she has her pets,

  • Throne Verse

    Two years of cinders built up in the hearth,

  • Painting

    all things look as if

  • Tongue of Language | Nightmare

    Oh tongue of language, moving with your comb

  • Nothing You Can Do Will Save You

    The Buddha had his river, just for now this one is mine,

  • The Peripheral Position of the Sun

    A young woman roars, laughs, splashes the face of a young man, nears the shore where the blinking lights of fireflies

  • Zero Plus Anything is a World

    Four less one is three.

  • Visitor’s Coming

    I’ve laid out

  • Abbatoir Time

    The widower pushed the tailgate shut and fell.

  • The Host of Turns

    We were gathered in this kind of circus-tent,

  • And After the Ark

    what was left behind was astounding:

  • From the River of News

    The President and his opponent both speaking in Ohio—

  • Bad Line in a Bad Paragraph

    Where "grab a bite"

  • Poem in the Old Style

    At the beginning of the play Hecuba was mourning her great losses. She made lists, blamed the Gods: they could

  • Nursing Home

    She had dreams fifty years ago

  • Last Poem

    Reader, today

  • A God | A Poet | “Facesti come quei che va di notte…” | The Mocking of Ceres

    Here lies a god who was obtuse, just like us.

  • The Shape of Things

    I’ve been reading the science books again

  • Standing by a Coppice Gate, Reading “The Darkling Thrush”

    The city gate loomed at century’s end,

  • One and a Half Poems

    Well it began with a microburst from the North when the moon

  • You Have to Lead the Sheep

    A dream struck a dream

  • A Snow Woman

    A window on a side yard in winter.

  • Tool & Die

    In the final unburdening, massive crates are moved

  • from Nothing in the Dark

    My mother would assuage my childhood night-fears by saying There's nothing in the dark that you can't see during

  • Evening

    The blue chair on the terrace, coffee, evening,

  • In the Vanguard

    It takes a few notes, a very few notes, to undo the bare bones of a person. Where formerly we were piecework in a

  • 1945

    The winter trees offer no shade no shelter.

  • The Easy Way to Stop Drinking

    We are as flies in a pitcher plant,

  • What is Pleasure

    The supreme pleasure of love

  • What God Says | Creek

    What you don’t know is that when you lay

  • The Living and the Dead | Arrest Warrant

    I already came here several times this year, aside from the pilgrimage

  • Halfway Through Civilization, Late to Another

    meeting for grown-ups, i hurry across campus,

  • The Recognizable |  Poem Beginning with a Line by C. Dale Young

    Like when an irresistible force

  • Birds There is No Moon

    Birds there is no moon

  • Wraith

    I never walk past that gate I don’t recall a rifle butt, two sharp yelps,

  • On Thumbing Through Smith’s Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation

    And what of the bird-headed dwarfs

  • No Nonsense | The Layout

    Split off for a sec

  • A Wedding in the Hotel

    Sorry, the dining room’s closed:

  • Serial

    I figure four times, you make it five

  • She Leans

    A house: scoured and scarred by wind, its unpainted

  • Stone Arabia

    The horses bisect the field

  • Ode to Cabeza de Vaca

    What good is it to see for miles and miles,

  • The Park from Above

    What scared them? Scores of wild green parrots

  • Glimmer Train | Strike-Slip

    Redwinged blackbirds in the cattail pond—

  • Georges de la Tour! Georges de la Tour! | Metka | The Cross

    I see how you climb!

  • Tenderly

    I see how you climb!

  • The Sudden Walk

    When evening comes to find you still

  • Else

    At the first instance, to amuse others,

  • How Self-Consciousness Counts

    Why in hell should anyone understand

  • Which Makes Me, I Guess, the Muddy Colorado

    What we learn from most pornography is

  • Frog Dream in July for Lucio’s Brother

    I am a frog; I can

  • BUSH | SERIAL

    Warms thieves.

  • House of Clouds | Song

    Clouds float over Giudecca  Island,

  • The Little Engine

    He is not an engine that could. Busted up, broken and backward, call him “fucked-up,”

  • He Was Amazed

    He was amazed by the curve of his life. What he thought unique had made its arc like any other, as if life had

  • Home

    Those last days in Hollywood—

  • Impressionist

    Once it was declared awful because it was brilliant

  • The Oklahoma Purchase

    William Howard Taft wouldn’t drink before dark.

  • 36.

    A woman was choked by a metal shackle

  • Six Blessings and a Curse

    Weigh odds. Pray. Pay bills.

  • For Night to Fall

    You could tell from the start that the best

  • The Museum of Mortal Sins | Soul

    We stood up to our waists in the icy water

  • Honor Guard

    Who does this body

  • Me Showering

    I am showering, which isn’t much in itself

  • How to Topple a Kingdom

    Read overly-detailed novels.  Prefer

  • En Route

    All over wherever we are the waves are making

  • Tool & Shade

    A brush of two minds still

  • Were We So Fragile?

    What promises didn’t you deliver, beautiful Life!

  • Henry’s Song

    Sometimes sitting in a friend's backyard on a fall evening

  • Say You’re Don Giovanni

    Say you’re Don Giovanni Giovanni and you make

  • The Mind Sliding

    around inside the scene:

  • Hurricane: Hera | Squall: Echo

    You never hear of Ixion, tied to a revolving wheel,

  • Of All the Birds

    The magpie I like least,

  • Before They Came For Us | Civilian Exiting the Facilities | Table for Six

    They met in the woods below our homes, brought their sawed-off shotguns and

  • Faust 1972

    This time, Faust was a nursing mother --

  • Arrow Boy

    They see her as a genie in a pager.

  • Zen Dictionary

    In the Zen Dictionary, intention

  • Ars Polis

    way too human too fast way too boring too quick

  • Home Life

    I was sitting still in an armchair

  • Firing My Father’s Mossberg

    At the shooting range,

  • ANY SINGLE THING | OFFERS OF SKY | THE EQUATION MUST BE BEAUTIFUL

    At the shooting range,

  • Carbide

    As he approached the river a little Fiat drew off the main road and parked among

  • Snow Day, by Jerome Sala

    The camera in the other room points and clicks

  • Pink is the Navy Blue of India

    Flea market guy tells me the pornos are five dollars

  • Reflection

    I am a lion

  • The Bird that Begins it

    In the world-famous night which is already flinging away bits of dark but not

  • Tolstoi Learned to Ride a Bike at an Age When Most of Us Cash in Chips by Annette Barnes & Stuart Friebert

    There we were, watching the parade, while he climbed up

  • Issue 9 Editor’s Note

    To our Readers:   Welcome to Issue #9 of Plume.   Briefly — comme d’habitude —-   In this issue,…

    Issue #9 March 2012

  • Far Country

    When you were in that country

  • Creek

    Now it is easy to find where the creek dwindles, where it thickens at last, where its

  • Travel Light

    By all means take my suitcase, which now again

  • Trouble

    And so it took shape, & from what.

  • The Freud Museum

    It’s 1938. Here’s moss on red brick

  • Crazy Hairdo, Crazier Head | Some Things to Consider Before We Proceed

    Spector pinned down twins LaFlora and LaFauna like butterflies, trimmed their

  • To Say

    There are dead children all over and under this earth

  • Booklet, Hand-Pressed Paper, Containing Locks of School-Children’s Hair, c. 1861

    Wound on a bobbin like thread.  Woven into a wreath

  • How to Pray

    Falling down on your knees is the easy part, like drinking

  • Zacharia, Malachi

    When the shepherd is stricken

  • The Third Visitor

    The Third Visitor understands

  • Dentist, Mexico, 1959

    The room was big, not small.

  • κάθαρσης

    Dr. Clark ordered daisies

  • Bosnia, Kentucky

    Court documents say her name is Azra Bašic. In 1992, twin knives

  • A Toy Airplane

    The tumor

  • N18P6

    the shape doesn’t

  • The Beautiful Hand

    Not a word.

  • Poem

    I’m going to pretend I’m a painter and just

  • Unified Theory

    The night is blue and staggered with stars.

  • Imagined Corners

    At the corner where the transept cuts the nave,

  • Edna St. Vincent, M.F.A.

    Chic and petite, blind to her destiny

  • The Mirror

    We dream of two dragons

  • Moment of Truth

    A matador imagines he has

  • Nude with Pebbles

    Flowers fall.  And I noticed

  • Ready to Be the Lover She Remembers Forever

    The gods are everywhere

  • Throw it All Away

    My granddaughter who.  The one alive in speech descends.  A plate

  • Ars Poetica

    The dark night caught Jerome by surprise

  • Pour Ainsi Dire

    Drinking. What is boozing? If not a liquid manner of corresponding, thanks to wine,

  • Zodiacal Light: A Dialogue

    To see it, you look to the north

  • Plume

    The old wheelbarrow aimed like a cannon

  • Ödön von Horváth | Brief Incident in Short a, Long a, and Schwa | My Friend’s Creation | Contingency (Vs. Necessity)

    Cat, gray tabby, calm, watches large, black ant.  Man, rapt, stands staring at cat and

  • A Place

    As a foreigner, I wasted a lot of energy

  • Preludium

    In The Odyssey,

  • Of Weeping

    First there is the weeping one weeps when one reads a good poem,

  • Barrage Balloons, Buck Alec, Bird Flu and You

    First there is the weeping one weeps when one reads a good poem,

  • In Memory

    I remember the night my father died

  • Vesuvius

    No gazette ran the story,

  • The Ant’s Plunder

    When I stuck out my hand to grab the iron door handle, a hidden ant attacked my right

  • My Heart in Evening

    In the evening one hears the sharp shrieks of bats.

  • The Death of Erik Satie

    The arches aspire to points

  • Rare Moment

    A clear choice

  • Three Fascinations

    to wake to an alarm

  • The Gone and the Going Away

    The world I know keeps going farther

  • Tiger Story

    Somewhere during my first or second year a tiger came into my life

  • An Oracle

    Why does the line end sooner than the page?

  • Home-Boys: Baby & Me (a Sapphic)

    Ex-gang members. Driveby days over. Zero

  • from Landscapes on a Train

    There once was a church. There once was a steeple. These things fall into

  • from “From Nothing”

    One note, another, in the parlor’s angled light,

  • News from Nowhere

    The sea handles laundry

  • Halloween

    No gazette ran the story,

  • Wilhelmina Shakespeare

    Blond hair, blue eyes, buck teeth:  we taunted you

  • white paper #46

    Obama Waffles Mix

  • Duet

    Their quest--what does the human body mean?--

  • Grave

    Over the grave the bird will

  • Inroad

    The radiance that is always around us is incited

  • Cotton Candy

    At first it gives like a sponge, elastically, and you think you’ll only make an

  • Notes on a 39-Year-Old Body

    Most internal organs jiggle and glow and are rosy

  • Poems for the Absent One

    Mother death,

  • To Fire

    In my backyard, huddled over my magnifying

  • New Home

    This house has no prehistory,

  • Last Day in Coldwater

    Our phone died due to lack

  • Rune

    Not timber or bronze or iridium, not the old habits of species at a waterhole or the short

  • Showering Behind the Zodiac’s Curtain

    When blue hangs around me, I am

  • Thinly Veiled

    In Alabama I learnt the difference between the state flag and the battle flag

  • Here at the Scene

    How will I tell her particular tale

  • Che Fai Di Bello

    They are burning the fields in

  • KRVAVÝ KOLENO

    Why does the line end sooner than the page?

  • It Happened at Wind Sings, Trees Whisper Farm

    The wind, broken and wild,

  • Fado Tropical

    O mundo do rio

  • The Unmet Lover

    Once I saw you in a freight elevator

  • On Contemplating a Sheep’s Skull

    Skull aged so much in rain and heat,

  • Powder

    Yesterday I opened your pill box, and there

  • The Third Sequence: Time

    Ribbon

  • Small Hut

    I know you only in echo,

  • Rembrandt, Self-Portrait, Age 51

    Rembrandt, I aspire to your self-portraits

  • Another Argument with Jim About the Soul

    You say I’d know it exists if

  • Don’t Bum Out the Musicians

    At St. Paul’s church, the musicians have heard it all.

  • A Date With an Undertaker

    He liked to bathe, dress,

  • Soup Teachers

    we called them, the women who stood behind

  • A Fable: The Floss-Silk Tree and the Philodendron

    In Brazil they call the floss-silk  palo borracho

  • Late in October

    Late in October, I watch

  • It’s Not Just Trains

    The ticket office was closing

  • Pitty-Pat

    Oleander to the death of horses

  • Don’t Pick the Cherries Yet

    Don’t pick the cherries yet—

  • Widow

    You cannot consider yourself a widow just because the full moon has gone

  • Leave It Lay Where Jesus Flung It

    What a colossal wrong fall she took—that mastodon caught

  • And

    And

  • The Hardworking Man

    On the island where I grew up, the hardworking man is the ideal man.  The

  • Focus

    The point at which

  • Fold

    I pet my pet, I fear my fear, I torment my torment, I wear my wear, I tear my tear, I

  • Missing

    If I told you simply that the bed in the Baptist Hospital

  • Paradise

    Our little vacation town in Spain is packed.  The driving, slow. Things have changed

  • The Lesson

    It seems to me you don’t dare express yourself

  • Late Portrait

    Dried flowers everywhere. Greeting cards. China plates hung on walls, showing a

  • Toussaint

    The soul, you said, is this sour wind, or this empty glass, the tiny steps of insects, these white iron

  • Like Body

    one light series    discrete

  • Mother Doesn’t Bite

    I bite instead and she needs salt,

  • The Remaining Breast

    I was showing my sister something about my breasts.

  • A Back Road Near Calais, 1961

    A Back Road Near Calais, 1961

  • A Nocturnal Upon Saint Charles Yeager’s Day

    Here comes that sonic boom

  • Poem for Shang Qin

    I’ve been digging my way toward you since the day I was born. I watch the

  • Today’s Comedy

    Why Dante in summer?