Poetry |
“The Plum The Plum” & “The Cup”
“She held (very carefully) a plum in her memory. She held it / in her mind in her hand. She carried the plum and its pit its / impermanence and stroked the cleft / of its breast …”
Literature in Translation |
from Night
“I search for truth in the books discarded in the square, in the dreams of sleeping cats and the intelligent gaze of dogs that roam through the gardens of Congress.”
Poetry |
“Living Room” and “Art”
“With brave reserve, the painter regards a floor lamp, a plum, / and a pool stick and reacts. The painting comes out in // flamboyant, fearful drag.”
Poetry |
“The Glass Parrot” and “Elegy in Susan’s Garden”
“I have never understood the way stars burst / apart. I am deaf to wind and trees, / to the rose bush we planted.”
Literature in Translation |
“To calm the ill that assails,” “We were among those called,” “A semantic error hides” & “The space of my body is this”
“We were among those called / against nature. Our existence / toppled and twisted the laws / of creation. But how could we, / luxuriant in our adolescent bodies, / be a waste, an untenable defect?”
Essay |
“The Guitar Lesson”
“I am sixteen. I have recently been kissed by my guitar teacher, a man of nearly thirty years, but I have been numb to that and to everything else since my father’s brain embolism propelled him into the hospital a week and a half ago.”
Poetry |
“Crystallography” and “In The Garden”
“You end up in a cute little town / that ends up having its water poisoned. / Fish are the first to betray the intruder. / Mercury rising. Octacarbon will follow your cattle / to their quick peace …”
Literature in Translation |
from Colonies of Paradise
“And Moscow’s on fire, all’s in — one and all — / the Kremlin cupola glistens in the light. / The fog rolls on, a worn gray man in a hat, / night backpedals into the subway shafts.”
Lyric Prose |
“Water Monologues”
“My wife went out to check the cars and they were submerged. But that’s not what she said. She said, ‘Look — a fox.'”
Poetry |
“When You Go to Venice Alone” and “The Uses of Pain”
“And when he finally appears, / about twenty and no English, / you’ll shadow him past the Fenice, / follow his gesture up the endless stairs.”
Essay |
“Abiding Beauty” and “Battle of the Horns”
“When we were boys, we called it The Cabin, though by then it had things that on buying the place our grandfather had lacked: light, heat, plumbing, telephone – all the modern rest.”
Poetry |
“Fugitive”
“How we touched tongues once / during a sleepover. How your parents // encouraged us to shower together to save water.”
Lyric Prose |
“Under Canine (outtakes)”
“Let Ramón remind the Lady that he is a Blessed Creature of the Living God, no less an Incarnation than she, more holy than profane in all his doings, as Beautiful as a Good Dog on a day at the Dog Park, when dog frolic is the movement of heaven.”
Poetry |
“I Think It Is Such a Beautiful” & “Not, like Venus, come ashore on a shell”
“as if time — those four years / between your births — were folded / and the two births became / one double emergence: // you, and you, and none other.”
Literature in Translation |
from claus and the scorpion
“lara wears a plaid shirt and her hair to the side, like a child / claus wears a plaid shirt and his hair to the side, like a child / neither one likes their name / and they walk down the wet streets, alone / because they don’t know how to walk any other way”