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He sat cross-legged, weeping on the steps
when Mom unlocked and opened the front door.
O God, he said. O God.
He wants to kill me, Mom.
for M. Maylor
Dear Anne Carson:
My friend read me the poem where your mom
said that the dead walk backwards.
You thought this myth arose from poor translation.
this is the transsensorium
there are indo-robo-women fighting cowboys on the frontier
& winning finally
the premodern is a foundation for the postmodern
wintermute, tessier-ashpool, armitage
the animal in me
is constant.
thirst starts,
hunger answers.
sleep is uncertain,
restless limbs.
in the night,
I hear footsteps.
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
I recited to him,
Now as I was young and easy,
and in the cough-afflicted wheeze that was left of my father’s voice,
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
What I adore is not horses, with their modern
domestic life span of 25 years. What I adore
is a bug that lives only one day, especially if
it’s a terrible day, a day of train derailment or
A work of art is a world of signs, at least to the poet’s
nursery bookshelf sheltered behind the artist’s ear.
I recall each little motto howling its ins and outs
to those of us who might as well be on the moon
We are losing the intensive care unit waiting room war
We were doing so well
So well we got sleepy
So sleepy the institution returned
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
the law mandates that a hate crime only be classified as such if there
is ample evidence to show that one’s actions were motivated by
prejudice toward an individual’s nationality, ethnicity, sexuality,
gender, etc.
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
for Alton Sterling, Andrew Loku, Philando Castile, et al.
I wanna live, son. But which son are you?
There where the rivers are made
of moonshine and the lights still wait,
In my dream my mother comes with me.
We are in the meadows we call
The Flats, walking the dogs.
Walk straight past the water trough,
she says, do not engage the moss.
Hello from inside
the albatross
with a windproof lighter
There’s a joke that ends with — huh?
It’s the bomb saying here is your father.
Now here is your father inside
your lungs. Look how lighter
the earth is — afterward.
Would I have seen her?
The tide tugging her gently past
the Comfort Inn; houses, tall and gabled,
i
At the heart there is a hollow sun
by which we are constructed and undone
You ran naked out the door. The neighbours laughed; I chased you down. I hardly see you anymore.
The rain set early in to-night,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
I am awake between stiff
sheets tonight in room thirty
four, listening to the heat
side a:
1. 18 and Life
her friend takes her to
We can never be with loss too long.
Behind the warped door that sticks,
the wood thrush calls to the monks,
If this brain’s over-tempered
consider that the fire was want
and the hammers were fists.
We have each tried to read to him, with no success, except for James,
who read him all of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the
Cévennes
At the end of the garden walk
the wind and its satellite wait for me;
their meaning I will not know
oh papa, to have you drift up, some part of you drift up through
water through
fresh water into the teal plate of sky soaking foothills, papa,
Here at Woodlands, Moriah,
these thirty-five years later,
still I could smell her fear.
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
No, nothing much has changed.
A year later, the world is still one you’d recognize —
no winged cars to clog the air,
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
What horror to awake at night
and in the dimness see the light.
Time is white
wandering to the other, wandering
the spiritual realities, skilled in all
ways of contending, he did not search
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
My father bequeathed me no wide estates;
No keys and ledgers were my heritage;
Only some holy books with yahrzeit dates
It was down that road he brought me, still
in the trunk of his car. I won’t say it felt right,
but it did feel expected. The way you…
Today doves flew from my head
and my hair grew
the longing is gone from my body
At the beginning I noticed
the huge stones on my path
I knew instinctively
What torture lurks within a single thought
When grown too constant, and however kind,
However welcome still, the weary mind
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
Down from the purple mist of trees on the mountain,
lurching through forests of white spruce and cedar,
stumbling through tamarack swamps…
Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading — treading — till it seemed
Sent to the ice after white coats,
rough outfit slung on coiled rope belts,
they stooped to the slaughter: gaffed pups,
So I’m an alcoholic Catholic mother-lover
yet there is no sweetish nectar no fuzzed-peach
thing no song sing but in the word
He, who navigated with success
the dangerous river of his own birth
once more set forth
For everyone
The swimmer's moment at the whirlpool comes,
But many at that moment will not say