translated by mira rosenthal You say: I have to go to Etna to pay farewell to my mother.We take the winding way where tourist jeeps go through the slag heaps of gray, black, bluish lava, you collect pebbles along the shoulderas if discovering traces of her.I dreamed of just such a landscape:she was working her …
The memoryof our earliest home is never relinquished and lies awake in the body.In the vibrant colors of my dreams,I kept passing from the garden’s lit perimeter— the embraceof its enclosures, its calm geometryand indelible greens— into aridity: a world of grasping roots and solitary trees piercing the soil where no water stirred. And because …
Are you the leather bellows stoking fire or a boy gasping after a stray kite?Are you the edge-spar or the troposphere tearing it free? Are you streaked like malachite or pierced with stars? The wheezy, exigent container of the dim confessionalor the passport photo booth, the flash’s glint? The sound of hammer-falls that miss the …
Lacrimae rerumJarred from our half-sleeping, we hear its muffled chorus past words, past caring for us,and think the sheetrock’s weeping. Shrill sighs, like a rusty piston.We press an ear to listen—the burst of a yowled report (our synapses misfiringor the whining of old wiring)dies down. How else interpret this noise next-door sings except as the …
What little we’ve reclaimed of what they were has become its name, a confection for the ear. Bush cricket. Pupfish. Amur tiger. Man.We think these two divergent trend lines mean the rise of this one species brought the fallof all else: ash trees, breeds of waterfowl. At first, we blamed a meteor, but now strong …
Icons of illustrated cloud and sun layer to say there will be someof both, and some percent chance of anything falling from the sky. Bythese symbols I try to guess what’s likely today, whether we’ll want to walka little in the spring dusk, or whether another storm will come lunging through the trees and streets, …
Someone stops over unannounced like the old days, so I pop open that bottle of Sancerre I’ve been saving.Talk turns to carp that reached the roadwayafter Thursday’s three inches of rain, how some saidInvasive, let them die, others said Naturalized, let them live, someone asked for a net and others said they’d catch them with …
IThere’s part of me that isn’t a girlWhen she stamps and ragesred lights shoot along the groundUnafraid of the moss-hung woods She goes therewhen the world wants to erase her Or to the ocean floorShape-shifter Tentacled Writhing and lighting upTetras float around herShe sends up a wave of soundIIOnce I had a friendWe dreamed in …
It takes almost nine minutes for sunlight to reach earthso there is a glance of timein the morning, the predawn graymy children love, when light has departed the station, outfor delivery, and we don’t even know what ultraviolet thought movestoward us. Three times this weeka book has reminded me we are madeof the dust of …
filoplume semiplume bristles an emptycalamus Feathers receive no nourishment They are deadstructures On a bird feather each barb holds smallerbarbs On us each loss encompasses smallerlosses Feathers soften the lines where different partsof the body meet They sculpt the body into a teardropshape There is a phrase in Vietnamese—chia bu`ôn— that translatesloosely into sharing sadness …