accumulation of land maintain household bear labor of house child
cooking reserve line belonging to elaborate isolation
familias implements enemies captured in war bearing child rearing
production heirs number and rear household family contains
Pass by the showy rose,
blabbing open,
suckling a shiny beetle;
pass by the changeless diamond
that falls asleep in shadow —
this love is a lichen,
alga and fungus made one fleck,
feeding on what it feeds,
growing slightly faster than stone
into a patch of gray lace,
a double thumbprint,
its bloom distinguishable, with practice,
from its dormant phase,
crocheting its singular habit
over time, a faithful stain
bound to its home,
etching on the unmoved rock
the only rune it knows.
If I could catch the green lantern of the firefly
I could see to write you a letter.
Why do you subdue yourself in golds and purples?
Why do you dim yourself with folded silks?
Do you not see that I can buy brocades in any draper’ s shop,
And that I am choked in the twilight of all these colors.
How pale you would be, and startling —
How quiet;
But your curves would spring upward
Like a clear jet of flung water,
You would quiver like a shot-up spray of water,
Brighter than fireflies upon the Uji River
Are your words in the dark, Beloved.
A hole torn in the fabric of the world,
the web, the whole infernal weave
through which live-giving rain is falling
but mixing with the tears and with the blood.
Dead body-snatchers enter, the mega-corpses,
much in the news these days, enter and grind
bones, flesh and sinews down to dry tree bark,
mixing with tree bark, crawling with the demonic
beetles. They’ ll tell it later: “No one expected this”:
not one — patient, doctors, practitioners
of every stripe, no one except the one whose daily
It was the summer of 1976 when I saw the moon fall down.
It broke like a hen’ s egg on the sidewalk.
The garden roiled with weeds, hummed with gnats who settled clouds on my
oblivious siblings.
A great hunger insatiate to find / A dulcet ill, an evil sweetness blind.
A gush of yolk and then darker.
Somewhere a streetlamp disclosed the insides of a Chevy Impala — vinyl seats, the rear- view,
headrests and you, your hand through your hair.
An indistinguishable burning, failing bliss.
Victor gets a real sense of power
from making his own raisins. He buys
pounds and pounds of grapes
and leaves them to dry
on the kitchen table.
Theresa doesn’ t want to hear about
her ex-husband’ s cancer. Not on Father’ s Day.
She takes a train all night
to have breakfast with her cousin.
All Sunday she rides the train back.
Once Martin’ s wife had left,
he decided to take advantage of her space.
He built a sauna where her closet was,
and now sits there every morning
to read the paper and Buddha.
The grave has more power than the eyes of the beloved.
An open grave with all its magnets.
This weight on the wings. The sky is waiting for an airship.
I have the feeling that I haven’ t got much life left.
Three hours after the celestial attack.
Why don’ t I respond when I’ m being offended?
Because my religion doesn’ t allow me to.
Exterior maps: geography. Interior maps: psychography.
And in your hard cathedral I kneel.
Mountains pass camels pass
like the history of wars in antiquity.
When I watched the Barbaric Writers defecate on my
manuscript, I felt a great sense of relief, a great sense of
fraternity with these men who loved literature enough to
destroy it, and I recalled a poem I had once written, but
never had the confidence to publish, about a so-called
poet who shat himself into a toilet, only to float on his
back as torrential downpours of power filled the bowl and drowned
him. I have always know that constipation is essential to
poetry, though what I did not realize, until recently,
