No one worth possessing
Can be quite possessed;
Lay that on your heart,
My young angry dear;
This truth, this hard and precious stone,
Lay it on your hot cheek,
Let it hide your tear.
Hold it like a crystal
When you are alone
And gaze in the depths of the icy stone.
Long, look long and you will be blessed:
No one worth possessing...
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Oda al vino
Vino color de día,
vino color de noche,
vino con pies de púrpura
o sangre de topacio,
vino,
estrellado hijo
de la tierra,
vino, liso
como una espada de oro,
suave
como un desordenado terciopelo,
vino encaracolado
y suspendido,
amoroso,
marino,
nunca has cabido en una copa,
en un canto, en un hombre,
coral, gregario eres,
y cuando menos, mutuo.
A veces...
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Now that the TV is gone and the music
has been hauled away,
it’s just me here, and the muffling silence
a spider wraps around a living morsel.
And at times, often, the unbearable.
I bear it, though, just like you.
Long ago, I bore a suitcase filled with books,
bore it far on city streets. To sell, I guess, at some
used-books place, one...
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So I’ll talk about it:
about the green eye of a demon in the colorful sky.
An eye that watches from the sidelines of a child’s sleep.
The eye of a misfit whose excitement replaces fear.
Everything started with music,
with scars left by songs
heard...
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In the still of night
old fears emerge.
Those closest relatives
you’d found barely
bearable, cornucopias
of family dystopia
spilling into
“amusing anecdotes”
decades later
like a much-thumbed
rosary, or litany
of the dead.
Old vexations,
tics and mannerisms,
wincing at the pinch
of the drunk uncle
(so handsome!—but
died young),
stooping to avoid
the hacking cough
soon to propel
your Hungarian grandfather
to his...
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By Timothy Donnelly
At night the sea’s surface is the penetrable onyx of deep sleep.
I enter it without fear, as if to lower the input of the eye
reduces risk, and whatever I can’t presently see
exists only in memory, which has been calmed by the water’s
cold hypnosis, and to be here is impersonal. Only the moonlight
interrupts this near-nothingness, the play...
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being
feet swathed in
seaweed sitting at
the edge of
the sea I
shiver in the cold April
wind gazing at stars
they mock me
a singer without
a song a
dancer with
no partner
a soldier
without a weapon
but the sea
sings for me the waves
construct a
fortress round
my feet and in this safe place
I have no need of
a...
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