All Poems

[I FIORI VENGONO IN DONO E POI SI DILATANO] …

in Just- …

In the Empire of Light …

in the general conservative cast, overcome by lack of suicidal tendencies, in the worried beyond reason shaking dense under-growth invasion of deliberately callous vertebrates, hotheaded newagers paint possible minds dirtier than can be produced in a real whereabouts nonlocation location, crumbling in darkness. …

In the spring time the stars began looking for him …

In the very night of movement where I …

On my stomach, I slip inside …

Intimacy unhinged, unpaddocked me. I didn’t want it. …

into the strenuous briefness …

It is abominable, unquenchable by touch, closer …

It was as if her love had become …

It was Jessica Grim the American poet …

It was the lack of certainty that disturbed him. First …

It would be neat if with the New Year …

It's been two thousand years now that, with a wounded leg, …

It’s no use …

it’s rank it cranks you up …

JE CONSENS QUE TOUT S'EFFACE] …

jumpsuits, they have changed …

Keen and lovely man moved as in a dance …

Kills bugs dead. Redundancy is syntactical overkill. A pin-prick of peace at the end of the tunnel of a nightmare night in a roach motel. Their noise infects the dream. In black kitchens they foul the food, walk on our bodies as we sleep over oceans of pirate flags. Skull and crossbones, they crunch like candy. When we die they will eat us, unless we kill them first. Invest in better mousetraps. Take no prisoners on board ship, to rock the boat, to violate our beds with pestilence. We dream the dream of extirpation. Wipe out a species, with God at our side. Annihilate the insects. Sterilize the filthy vermin. …

[LA MENTE E IL CORPO SONO ANGELI] …

LA RUE PROFONDE …

Ladies, who of my lord would fain be told, …

at 4:30 AM …

there was no air/ the sheets made ripples under his …

[LE VENT SECOUE LE SOUVENIR] …

HEINER MULLER …

LES CORBEAUX …

Les plantes et les planètes …

tongue / rim a soft hole—tender meat trim— …

Let us gather in a flourishing way …

Let’s try this: …

Dear Gary, …

listen mother, he punched the air: I am not your son dying …

little tree …

¿are you …

Long neglect has worn away …

love is more thicker than forget …

Lying in bed I think about you, …

marry at a hotel, annul ’em …

MATIN D'HIVER …

HEATHER DOHOLLAU …

Mosquito at my ear— …

Mr. Van Ess bought 14 washcloths? …

Murmurs from the earth of this land, from the caves and craters, …

transmisogynists seek hymen lie / “true” he …

My mother saw the green tree toad …

My prime of youth is but a frost of cares, …

Networks under the forests, …

night and …

PATRIZIA CAVALLI …

O my Lord, …

O Serbian sibyl, prophetess …

O sweet spontaneous …

Ocean which I pushed up …

SOPHOKLES …

Eros, unconquered in …

SOPHOKLES …

Odio la fiebre que se posa en tu frente …

Of a girl, in white, between the lines, in the spaces where nothing is written. Her starched petticoats, giving him the slip. Loose lips, a telltale spot, where she was kissed, and told. Who would believe her, lying still between the sheets. The pillow cases, the dirty laundry laundered. Pillow talk-show on a leather couch, slips in and out of dreams. Without permission, slips out the door. A name adores a Freudian slip. …

Of all that God has shown me …

often …

Old Mother turns blue and from us, …

Once in moonlight when I had not slept for three nights, …

GREGORIO SCALISE …

Over a cup of coffee or sitting on a park bench or …

Over here he made a pile of what he had had and …

Passing the shop after school, he would look up at the sign …

Dear Aleph, …

photos of her father …

ROBERT MARTEAU …

Popcorn-can cover …

Posterity, this me is Now— …

[QUALCUNO MI HA DETTO] …

[QUAND TU NE SAVAIS RIEN] …

ROBERT MARTEAU …

rain frog thorn bug tent bat …

ready to receive remains built for death, ready to receive the flatly desolate superficial deeply commissioned intellectual offer of suggestive actions, for the hunger assassin to fall back on and become forcefull psychological damage, bottled for drinkable agitation. …

Record no oiled tongue, diary- …

We, the Research Assistants and Teaching Assistants of the University of California, wish to register our protest against the new loyalty oath for the following reasons. …

THERE …

[RICEVO DA TE QUESTA TAZZA] …

where the route of a ship bringing tax grain from the provinces is described …

i make signs everywhere, with sticks, stones and leaves …

GREGORIO SCALISE …

She goes, she is, she wakes the waters …

She used to throw her old crockery at the moon …

Show me the body that brides its quest, …

Since everything turns …

Sleeping sister of a farther sky, …

Sometimes I want a corset like …

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond …

Brave comrade, answer! When you joined the war, …

name address date …

You jerk you didn't call me up …

Sounds from the distant world …

In March, 1984, on reading, at an editor's request, a manu- …

Stolen? that is exactly how …

I said love because it came closest said leave …

DECEMBER 2001 …

Such pleasures he had taken in books-not the …

[SE FOSSE UN MARE QUESTO VENTO IMMENSO] …

That this is the morning in which nothing much …

the bigness of cannon …

The bird’s-eye view abstracted from the bird. Cover me, says the soldier on the screen, I’m going in. We have the sense of being convinced, but of what? And by whom? The public is a hypothetical hole, a realm of pure disappearance, from which celestial matter explodes. I believe I can speak for everyone, begins the president, when I say famous last words. …

The challenge: to start …

And then I began my habit …

the day shifts, we talk to each other the way we talk to each other, the luster fades, our bodies fill with sap, there is a shift, joy reappears before another personal narrative burns to a heap of citations, continuing in complicated machinery, becoming blood knots in space, both the living and dead surround the present has been. I open my eyes in the full force of fear and hesitation, frozen in passing passageways with endless permutations, subjected to violence, stupidity, and love. …

The day, with all its pain ahead, is yours. …

The dead girl by the beautiful Bartlett. …

The dead man's clothes …

Ay me, to whom shall I my case complain, …

The earth shakes …

The giant takes us …

The happy ones are almost always also vulgar; …

The house was just twinkling in the moon light, …

The man who knows the secret of the desert can …

The more he considered his death, the more he felt …

the one who has not gone …

The order of islands here …

The predictability of these rooms is, in a word, exquisite. These rooms in a word. The moon is predictably exquisite, as is the view of the moon through the word. Nevertheless, we were hoping for less. Less space, less light. We were hoping to pay more, to be made to pay in public. We desire a flat, affected tone. A beware of dog on keep off grass. The glass ceiling is exquisite. Is it made of glass? No, glass. …

she wasn’t born in this city. she found its basalt greenstone chunks, seafloor forced skyward. it found her hands through mist and odors whirring pigeons’ clubfeet fluttering, toothless men’s paper sacks spilling elixirs, roots, shark fin tonics. heat swelling sewer steam rising, side street chess match maneuvers mystifying. it sought her whirlwind hair, grown seavine thick. songbird, adrift, nestling neon, she crafted snares for moths, butterflies, treasure hunting children tracing ideographs: sky, sun. patina spires, smirking dragon boys humming silk lanterns, flight of phoenixes through fish vendors’ stalls, corrugated plastic blackbird perches, jade-ringed gardens, needle-tipped shanties. it bulleted trees, lighting hash pipes; herbalists’ storefront canopies concealing leathered men, versed in languages of whiskered ghosts. it invented her dialect carving tongue: salt fables, yellow caution tape palaces. she lost herself in this city. it lured her, drank her air; honey voice’s precision, hybrid beyond memory. songbird, adrift, this city’s misplaced siren. migration patterns subterranean streams swallowed whole. …

The snow is melting …

The stripes of smoke describing an oblique, …

the target is a record of the past history of the target …

The water was rising, I got up on the bed …

The wild and wavy event …

there is a shipwreck on each side of innuendo, tears gather around the collective shadow of shadows; none clearer than the last unshakable, anatomically inexplicably, never noticed, next time, please sir, more. …

There is someone who knows. …

There's something like pain in the room, and …

They inherit a packet of earth …

They speculate on a fall …

They travel in threes, usually in station waggons or utes, …

They, lost, and to the …

Do not allow me to sink, I said …

This handwriting wears itself away, …

VALERIO MAGRELLI …

I won't permit the flight of perfumes, the air …

Throwing his life away, …

Time, that gnaws at bronze lions and dolphins …

To be crippled means to be institutionalized, infantilized, unemployed, outcast, feared, marginalized, fetishized, desexualized, stared at, excluded, silenced, aborted, sterilized, medicalized, stuck, discounted, teased, voiceless, disrespected, raped, isolated, undereducated, made into a metaphor or an example. To be crippled means to be referred to as retard, cute, helpless, lame, bound, stupid, drunk, idiot, a burden on society, in/valid. To be crippled means to be discounted as a commodity or regarded as mere commodity. …

To learn what to say to unlearn …

They call it sacrifice— imagine me a tiny poppy …

Sheila, we speak here on the fly …

To simulate the burning of the heart, the humiliation …

To stand on a high place, a cliff above the ocean, …

to walk means to fall …

2. …

One day I wake …

Traveler, your footprints …

Trying to see the proportional relation …

evening the priest …

The street I walk along I often see …

Under the evening moon …

It occurs to me that, …

the sac …

up from slobbery …

VERLAINE …

If I don’t taste the complicated waves— …

We are the knife people, iron men, coat people …

We made fires which licked the clouds' chasubles, …

We wonder at our shifting capacities, keep …

World like a coat, silver clasps, …

What horror to awake at night …

what if a much of a which of a wind …

What is the sound of sounds …

What land have you cast from the blotted-out region of your face? …

What man so quick and clever of wit …

When from my counted days I think of …

When I stop to consider my calling, remark …

When the bed is empty, we pull the shades to block light, …

when the eye has finally …

where the fish had withdrawn …

ROBERT MARTEAU …

why …

Whiskers a wren could nest in. …

For I have loved the blade with all my crippled …

With the voice of the fieldmouse …

[YESTERDAY MORNING] …

Yesterday, the sunshine made the air glow …

you fit into me …

Your life is a baby not yet born, …

In a seaside desert port …

.poem-wrapper span { …

& as you bow your heads to pray / pray …

An American armada. One sheetless cot aboard a cargo ship. …

our wages: hourly: paid not in effort or labor but in the value of  being  present …

(i) …

with Dana Ward …

This boat you’re videotaping. You’re looking at a boat. Despite your protests that you are looking at a translation of the fourth poem in the corpus of Catullus, I assure you you are looking at this boat. Lots of bad things battered this boat. Forget about volunteering to swab its lintels. This boat denies it was minced in the Adriatic. It denies that it lit up the Cyclades with an all night buck and spill. Rhodes is horrible, noble, Thracian. Proponents of Rhodes call truce though it might be their sinuses. Where this boat is is post-boat. The word for this boat is phaselus. A phaselus was a rather long and narrow vessel, named for its resemblance to a kidney bean. This boat was built for speed. Yet this boat is sort of fragile. Lots of bad things battered this boat from the beginning of its life to now. You state it’s cracked, but I tell you to go put your stupid hands in the water. Say it again. The boat frets about its impotence, falls over dead. The boat sucks lava dexterously; yes, this boat is right-handed. Its aura chainsmokes cigarettes, looks up at Jupiter out there in space, and its beams moist. What happens below deck, and involves feet, stays below deck. I’m not literally pointing out this boat to you, I’m writing a poem about it in limping trimeters. But this is a fact: botulism is sad. Noobs lurch toward a limpid coast. And before them stands a boat, a beautiful old boat looking like a kidney bean built for speed. It sits there quiet and old, looking over the lake and thinking this lake is really limpid. The noobs all have twins. …

This boat you’re videotaping. You’re looking at a boat. Despite your protests that you are looking at a translation of the fourth poem in the corpus of Catullus, I assure you you are looking at this boat. Lots of bad things battered this boat. Forget about volunteering to swab its lintels. This boat denies it was minced in the Adriatic. It denies that it lit up the Cyclades with an all night buck and spill. Rhodes is horrible, noble, Thracian. Proponents of Rhodes call truce though it might be their sinuses. Where this boat is is post-boat. The word for this boat is phaselus. A phaselus was a rather long and narrow vessel, named for its resemblance to a kidney bean. This boat was built for speed. Yet this boat is sort of fragile. Lots of bad things battered this boat from the beginning of its life to now. You state it’s cracked, but I tell you to go put your stupid hands in the water. Say it again. The boat frets about its impotence, falls over dead. The boat sucks lava dexterously; yes, this boat is right-handed. Its aura chainsmokes cigarettes, looks up at Jupiter out there in space, and its beams moist. What happens below deck, and involves feet, stays below deck. I’m not literally pointing out this boat to you, I’m writing a poem about it in limping trimeters. But this is a fact: botulism is sad. Noobs lurch toward a limpid coast. And before them stands a boat, a beautiful old boat looking like a kidney bean built for speed. It sits there quiet and old, looking over the lake and thinking this lake is really limpid. The noobs all have twins. …

: sorry this not that poem …

: .or. this malus thing never to be confused with justice …

LARRY BIGNER …

Every wife must apologize for not being her husband’s …

In the other world we use other words, painting …

Whole towns like • horses turnt loose in the bardo of • …

I stumble down around torn peaks …

But that dashing, dauntless, delphic, diehard, diabolic cracker likes his fiction turned with a certain elegance and wit; and that anti-anti-anti-slum-congestion clublady prefers romance; …

My economy is circular: I earn money from an institution that owns most of …

Philosophic …

Deathless Aphrodite of the spangled mind, …

The Wise Men will unlearn your name. …

We'd like to talk with you about fear they said so …

Robber, paid agent of our hate, …

In Joe Priskulnick's darkened kitchen the face …

Propped up within the hideous bed …

Dumbfounded in hospital whites, you are picture-book …

My sister died. He raped me. They beat me. I fell …

Where was it that we went that night? …

All the sailboats in the harbor …

Coroae-me de rosas. …

Crown me with roses. …

ROBERT BEUM …

Não quero recordar nem conhecer-me. …

I do not want to remember or to know myself. …

Swaggering like rain like rain like rain …

there are suitcases in my room …

She considers a field. She considers a field and buys it. Let her have the fruit of her hands. …

In woodblock print …

article xiii …

The sacred is a bore we ducked, …

Saps, and the anal grease of an otter, and pig's blood, …

Thou two-faced year, Mother of Change and Fate, …

You’re leaving Las Vegas, except …

ISIST PSALM …

After Thomas Love Peacock's Memoirs of Percy Bysshe Shelley …

My dearest father, it is the year’s First Day, …

I celebrate myself …

Tom Thumb and his bride …

Like true believers elated by what they've seen, …

Science …

If I had to begin again …

The porchlight coming on again, …

They were a long time there. There were great trees …

I …

Superman flies onto his first comic book. …

Tell me demon eyes that know …

Did I or didn't I write about Lucky Burkin? …

I wore a large brim hat …

I …

It is a damp gray morning in the fall of 1946. …

Weighing the ages makes a social game: …

Uncomprising year—I see no meaning to life. …

Against the purple sky soft bombs were flowering, …

Here, in the thick Carolina darkness, …

The summer everyone left for the moon …

a harvest gold & avocado green leisure suit with fm radio, it was their, …

They arrived at the desk of the Hotel Duncan …

From my hometown, near Vilna, her letter came; …

The world's long fires burn beyond …

i was leaving my fifty-eighth year …

The halo of gadflies permeated the noontime …

It was hers. …

MIKE McCLURE …

1.] NUMB FUGGO STRANGER W. PRISTINE RECTUM …

First Day On The Job …

Sleep is 20 …

It begins simply with a fist, white-knuckled …

مرة قنصتُ غزالا. والغزال ضرورة شعرية لا غير. …

أنتظر نهاية آب ومقتل أيلول. …

أغنيك يا طائر البلشون المهاجر. …

Amo o que vejo porque deixarei …

I love what I see because one day …

Vivem em nós innumeros; …

Inside us live innumerable others; …

The guy my girlfriend ran off with …

When I think of the man who lived in the house …

The one cashier is dozing— …

] …

a man is killed in Mobile, Alabama. It is 1981, nearest what some will call the last lynching in America. The business of our nation goes forward—a star leads and hostages are freed while Michael Donald walks from the corner store. He is 19, the youngest of six, a college boy. He will miss class the next morning and Sunday dinner; he will not bring the cigarettes to his sister. Those weeks after spiriting me into the world, my mother watches the news, looks over at my father too frequently, calls his name each time he heads to another room—delirious in her exhaustion and fear—where was he, would he disappear? And the little girl, what world was this for her to enter? Crosses burning on the county courthouse lawn, then other sons with ropes and guns, looking for anyone, find Michael Donald walking, ask him for directions, a sign for old haints. They show him the rifle and what can he do but be forced into the car, driven past this life into the next. Years later, in an unimaginable victory, his mother will bankrupt the KKK, demanding they pay for her loss and others, while my mother, like so many, carries me daily to school around the corner, insists on watching until I am beyond the large blue doors. Mothers are God again, and they will not go quietly; they know everything born will need to be fed, even children hung from low branches in their jean jackets and muddy tennis shoes, carried out of the wood into the light of everyone's suffering. …

We got through this year and nobody; …

CLAYTON ESHLEMAN …

A quarter of a century …

(N. Y. 1/29/33) …

Downing his drink to toasts of cut-rate jokes, …

I imagine a child who has swallowed up his parents too soon... . …

Déboucher de la nuit …

Breathes the world that invests her …

-or, as I said to my undergraduate poetry students, …

seen a dove / in passing / the white side …

That vacation you promised we'd go dancing …

In icy fields. …

May I never be afraid …

He seems to me equal to gods that man …

For R.L.C. …

The astrologer says that this …

The country with the face of its mother …

red rock giants …

Generally Speaking: …

Even in dreams, your father is working, …

Here, the sentence will be respected. …

3AG …

No bitter peach or stranger fruit …

The shift of sleepwalks and suicides. …

sleepwalker can never die …

Nine stories high Second Avenue …

Wasn't that your cheek against mine last night …

of July …

I …

Sometimes we would get hungry for the neighborhood. …

Birds and periodic blood. …

The house that is on fire …

I’m all alone in this world, she said, …

How did we get here so suddenly, …

I don't know what to do …

In brief, I am sunbathing in Berkeley. …

Dear Xadi …

I’ve gone beyond the expectant time of dreaming and now no dreams. …

I'm used to the emperor's bitterness …

two oblong lobes …

I write my aubade. To the moon …

Men are trading their bullets for worms. …

When the wind roars in from the east like this, …

Wake, butterfly— …

To the Chief Laureate upon Muthlabben, …

In the back of the junkhouse …

Nice day, …

from my bed …

Translated from the Japanese …

A flying pigeon hit me on a fall day …

Sabio é o que se contenta com o espectaculo do mundo, …

Wise is the man who contents himself with the spectacle of the world, …

VOL. LVII NO. II …

Dear P: …

At home, in my flannel gown, like a bear to its floe, …

The number of years of your sentence ... …

They wore out the a …

one box falls out of another box, ashy covenant of separation …

don’t ever get the idea I am a poet; you can see me …

When I was a child of say, seven, …

I remember when I was a kid, my pop …

we VOL, XXVII …

See it, the beautiful ball …

The whole ball …

Isidore Ducasse, Isidore Ducasse, …

The burden of hard hitting. Slug away …

Kneel down, fair Love, and fill thyself with tears, …

Bird of the bitter bright grey golden morn …

“They made her a grave, too cold and damp …

(Cape Town, The Matopos, Academia, Pretoria) …

I think that if you pelted …

Her smock was of the holland fine, …

FREDERICK BOCK …

"A BAR AT THE FOLIES BERGERE" …

A barefoot boy! I mark him at his play— …

Under the bronze crown …

The warping night air having brought the boom …

Red mills and farms clumped soothingly here and there. …

ROBERT SIEGEL …

(Alice Mattison dreamed that I wrote a poem with this title) …

Stay me, Constable, on the stone bridge …

We like to listen to her dress; …

Corinna, pride of Drury-Lane …

i. Awake …

I am …

In those days stone became bright and the dove bright-grey. …

To move into a landscape one must stand …

Cloo, cloo, cloo is said softly …

I have no wit, no words, no tears; …

Habits accrue …

II. Conversion …

Lost: black bible in case, Chicago address. Please call. . . …

In springtime, chief of all seasons, …

In a sesone of somere þat souerayne ys of alle, …

This morning's minion was white-shouldered, …

the truth flies hungry, at least and otherous, …

Poetry for January 1952 …

My heart is like a singing bird …

In her eighties now, and weak and ill …

Across an aircraft aisle …

I have sown beside all waters in my day. …

An envelope arrives unannounced from overseas …

is a meadow …

You wouldn't have believed it, how …

Because the Sun exudes a blaze of riddles …

Twice a year Apa cooked his “monk’s half-moon” dish: pumpkin blossom …

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, …

This morning we gather in gratitude for all aspects of sacredness: …

Today when persimmons ripen …

I teach my friend, a fisherman gone blind, to cast …

A blind man was riding an unheated train, …

He was out, or down, in their strange darkness …

Sometimes all the roads seem dark. …

She had turned her face up into …

Me from close contact with the world. …

A bloody husband thou art because of the circumcision. Exodus, IV, 26 …

enough to knock the earth from its orbit— …

Under the heave of a far-off storm …

For Aline …

for a snootful of roots, fallen fruits, and the carrion …

O beautiful …

A boat beneath a sunny sky, …

ALLEN KANFER …

Certain labels are impervious …

A body must remind itself …

Afterwards, we'll all remember …

He ate and drank the precious words, …

1. …