“The thing that was magic about it was that once you put down one word, you could cross it out. . . . I put down mountain, then I'd go, no—valley. That's better.”

“A ‘truth’ detached and purified of pleasures of ordinary life is not worth a damn in my view. Every grand theory and noble sentiment ought to be first tested in the kitchen—and then in bed, of course.”

Our life stories are scary and droll,
Like masks children wear on Halloween
As they go from door to door

I sharpened knives
All night.
To welcome you

In my spiderweb
You got caught,
My precious.

Children’s fingerprints
On a frozen window
Of a small schoolhouse.

Grandpa loved crawling
Under the skirts of his mother’s friends
As they sat on the porch

Bald man smoking in bed,
Naked lightbulb over his head,
The shadow of his cigar 

 

Sat up
Like a firecracker
In bed,

The name of a girl I once loved
Flew off the tip of my tongue
In the street today,

You’ve been paying visits
To that hunchbacked tailor
In his long-torn-down shop,

Dine in style tonight
With your misery, Adele.
Put on your silver wig

It pains me to see an old woman fret over
A few small coins outside a grocery store—

I’m the uncrowned king of the insomniacs
Who still fights his ghosts with a sword,

Bad luck, my very own, sit down and listen to me:
You make yourself scarce for months at the time

The long day has ended in which so much
And so little had happened.

Stalin was killing off his fellow revolutionaries,
The first Dairy Queen opened in Kankakee, Ill.,
As I lay in my crib peeing in my diapers.

 

There are country roads now that are empty.
They’ll hold on to the light of the day

This landscape with its somber skies
Must have fallen in love
With a story by Edgar Allan Poe.

He liked drunks in church,
Nudists playing volleyball,
Stray dogs making friends,

When she still knew how to make shadows speak
By sitting with them a long time,
They talked about her handsome father,

What I hate are short winter days,
Cold and snowless afternoons,

 

The truth is dark under your eyelids.
What are you going to do about it?
The birds are silent; there’s no one to ask.

Neon at sundown, early shadows
Going to meet the one and true darkness.
Avenue where I was a child in a shoe box,

This couple strolling arm in arm
Must be figments of someone’s revery.
They stop often to linger over a kiss,

That future life, slept in the anemic sunlight
While the old poison slowly filled my whole
      bloodstream.

In the palace, at the table set for the feast, they were
      awaited

O light, unsayable in your splendor.
A lot of good you did to me.

We were inmates of an orphanage in Kraków;
A prison in Panama;
A school for the blind in Genoa.

Between Something and Nothing you chose that which in
      truth is Nothing!

For whom are you intended, wine in the corked bottle?
Through whose veins will you send your merry little flame

What’s the reason for your sudden laughter, butcher,
while you stand next to that which only a moment ago was
      living, peeling her skin off as if it were an expensive dress

 

 

The mouse is golden,
and so is the turtle, and the spider, 

 

someone who in that instant
is preoccupied with thoughts of suicide
is forced by nature’s call

An old dog afraid of his own shadow
In some southern town…
The story told to me by a woman going blind

Philosophers practicing their scissor-clips
In the dark,
So everything comes out

There’ll be nothing but infinite space.
The silence supreme, the silence almighty.
Bright sky. Many stars.

On a morning otherwise sunless,
Strolling arm in arm
Past some gallows-shaped trees

It’s raining, it’s pouring,
And your heart is sad,
But you’re not about to say it.

Teeth-marks intact.
She tied a red ribbon
Halfway between

We played war during the war,
Margaret. Toy soldiers were in demand,

Like a busy street scene
Reflected in a butcher’s window:
Trimmed head of a large pig

Very peaceful, except,
There’s a faint moan

And of course, Philemon, who’s about to die
      laughing
At the sight of an ass eating figs.

 

 

only its maternal dark
could make us luminous.

and you shudder
as you realize it’s only you

Circle of suffering,
Of madness.

on the watch-chain
of our insomnia
it sits howling

time enough to feel
its just weight
to imagine its blinding clarity

the fundamental equation
of an empty street
in a rundown neighborhood

bent as I was
intently
over the particular.

 

 

I rattled off the dates
of wars and revolutions.
I rejoiced