( Read more... )

Even a crazy person wants to be asked.

-The Hours

Fed by the blown wires
of a storm-fried fusebox,

your mind had always been dark,
hiding its pulses and breaks

behind a steel panel.
Don't say I didn't love you-

I backed away
from your pain because

it was a cruelty too naked
for a frail man to bear;

and because your husband had already
given you the comfort you ( Read more... )

Patroclus rising beside him stabbed his right jawbone,
ramming the spearhead square between his teeth so hard
he hooked him by that spearhead over the chariot-rail,
hoisted, dragged the Trojan out as an angler perched
on a jutting rock ledge drags some fish from the sea.

-The Iliad

So, you decided to wait. What things you saw,
I will never know; your mind ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

Look in my eyes with thy sweet eyes intently,
give me your hand and let me press it gently.

-Mrs. Dalloway

I've imagined you ten or twenty times,
as the wings of the sunset sink and close
around your blushing face and neck,
held in my red, red hands.

Your knees, however, have long since
gone cold for me. They tremble for others.
My ambition, also, shook and ( Read more... )

Once, in a rusted Ford, I drove ( Read more... )

I can't stop loving you ( Read more... )

I am a beard twister ( Read more... )

Raccoon eyes
in the shadow of the counter reveal that this man,
handsome and pathetic, will be a thief. That he will place

the girl,
half-ugly but powerful, allonge
on the painted flowers of a hotel blanket

we have taken
for granted. Here, in the diner, the criminal will clutch
and sip dumbly from his empty cup of coffee.

Redempteurs du malyou ( Read more... )

Skitters of a dozen green branches, the Florida breeze rattles in my dozing ears. So as the sun goes down we are a tiny city of a few thousand porch-sitters, slowly lifting our cans of beer, slowly watching the time slip through our fingers. By the thousands, we finish what we opened; all at once we turn the doorknobs to our apartments, slide under ( Read more... )