It’s this crazy weather we’ve been having: Falling forward one minute, lying down the next Among the loose grasses and soft, white, nameless flowers. People have been making a garment out of it, Stitching the white lilacs together with lightning At some anonymous crossroads. The sky calls To the deaf earth. The proverbial disarray Of [...]
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By Pablo Neruda Death kept dispatching and reaping its tribute in sites and tombs: man with dagger or with pocket, at noon or in the nocturnal light, hoped to kill, kept killing, kept burying beings and branches, murdering and devouring corpses. He prepared his nets, wrung dry, bled white, departed in the morning smelling blood [...]
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Wednesday, October 7, 2009
My memories of nights spent pacing the silent suburban streets of Florida were complemented today when I opened a book of Elizabeth Jennings poems and found Curtains Undrawn. This work describes the poet’s times spent catching near-voyeuristic glimpses of “modest lives”. Curtains Undrawn Looking in windows down a night-time street In Winter, I don’t feel [...]
A breeze off the lake–petal-shaped Luna-park effects avoid the teasing outline Of where we would be if we were here. Bombed out of our minds, I think The way here is too close, too packed With surges of feeling. It can’t be. The wipeout occurs first at the center, now around the edges. A big [...]
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Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Mind’s Heart Mind’s heart, it mustbe that sometruth lies lockedin you. Or else, lies, alllies, and no mantrue enough to knowthe difference. Robert Creeley
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Still glinting wings; the dull-red lacquer head Lifted from its socket, turned machanically This way and that, like a wristwatch being wound, As if there would always be time . . . From The House Fly, by Robert Merrill
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There is a solitude about Sunday afternoons In small towns, surrounded by all that’s familiar And of necessity dear, That chills us on hot days, like today, unto the grave, When the sun is a tongued wafer behind the clouds, out of sight, And wind chords work through the loose-roofed yard sheds, a celestial music [...]
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Thursday, September 18, 2008
big tears, each one the size of your bastard hearts,
flowing down
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Thursday, September 18, 2008
Of course the point of Passages is that I copied them for a reason. Sometimes it is safe to do so but why let them lie there, dumb museum pieces, listless zoo creatures, captured. I am guilty of that since youth: Laying ideas out and assuming they will spread on their own. It is a [...]
Thursday, September 18, 2008
I would like a simple lifeYet all night I am layingPoems away in a long box. It is my immortality box,My lay-away plan,my coffin. THE AMBITION BIRD Birds turn into plumber’s tools,A sonnet turns into a dirty joke,A wind turns into a tracheotomy,A boat turns into a corpse,A ribbon turns into a noose. [...]
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