Anyone who had seen loons and grebes, kingfishers and bee- eaters, larks, martins and thrushes, singly and in pairs, at rest or swarming, on the banks, on the river, soaring overhead. Anyone who heard their calls, their songs, the commotion they made in the low, dry grasses. Anyone who had been taught to fear the …
When my transplantedkidney begins to ache, throbbing needles deep through my love handle, I’m sitting at Tim Hortonsfour thirty in the morning thinking about my life back in Wastefield where no one is anyone and everyone is someonetrying to get out. My body is tied to the land where the organ entered, butI ignore thatcreek …
for anyone, a lullaby, lieto fine, music for baking. What puzzles me is why you look to poetry at all, if you find the unsettling so unsettling. The Christmas questions arrive in tight little wrappings (a hobby, right?) and only pave conviction’s increase. My deprivations do not make me as achy as one might think. …
In the otherwise sedate painting of seventeenth-century flowers, a hothouse number. An importation from the colonies, nurtured into bloom and the representation of bloom. Unfurling white folds and scalloped folds of folds unfolding, and ten children all taking their turns at making it impossible for their mother to concentrate on the light from within the …
All day behind our houses, bulldozershave knocked down the tall oaks, the hickories, the poplars with their orange-and-lime cups suckling spring bees. Finally they’ve brokenfor dusk. The windows I walk past are lit with end-of-day succor: glimmers of ice clinking whiskey, a blade unsistering the tender flesh of salmon from its skin,from a basement window, …
translated by Ryan Choi Snow; falls—“ . . . what the snowhath wrought . . .” Christmas— time, in the pinkof a black man’s palm. Cake inour bellies, beneath themoon in the mackerel sky. Clear— winter airportnoons travelerspassing through. Looking glass: a boy’s glass ears, ashe munches on plumswith friends. Man— crumples andvomits on the …
The hawk is circling a sky the color of wet newspapers. All over town the goldenrod is going to seed, and the bees turn lazy with the lack of flowers. Even so the hunger persists. Look around. The nests in the trees are suddenly obvious. The sand confirms the animals. I think of you not …
A lungfish has a mouth like a kiss It rises sweetly to sip from the airfrom a flat earth thanks to Mercator turning a volumetric ellipsoid to a planeand with squinches dissolving domes in the Alhambra solidity was nothingColor was said to be only refraction Heart and Life were folded in our palmsYet a horizon …
Acausality says each moment is the result of itself Philosophy can propose some positions that denyeven themselves that a mind cannot know another mind But knowing does not require identicalityFruit that snaps the branch Virus that kills its host That bloom This poem All the unpredictable accumulating instants on the way to perishing
after “The Guest House” by Rumi The moon is nothing but a circular ghost backlit, just disappearing beyond the roofs, beneath whichan arm brushes an arm, skin sheds its light so thinly we forget we can seeAnd in our room, sleepon the brink of extinction, sheepout to pasture; their small black eyes blink night awayHow …