New and Selected Poems Read Free

gone already)
I sing through the throat
of an empty beer bottle.
Errata
Where it says snow
read teeth marks of a virgin
Where it says knife read
you passed through my bones
like a police whistle
Where it says table read horse
Where it says horse read my migrant’s bundle
Apples are to remain apples
Each time a hat appears
think of Isaac Newton
reading the Old Testament
Remove all periods
They are scars made by words
I couldn’t bring myself to say
Put a finger over each sunrise
it will blind you otherwise
That damn ant is still stirring
Will there be time left to list
all errors to replace
all hands guns owls plates
all cigars ponds woods and reach
that beer bottle my greatest mistake
the word I allowed to be written
when I should have shouted
her name
The Bird
A bird calls me
From a tall tree
In my dream,
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Calls me from the pink twig of daylight,
From the long shadow
That inches each night closer to my heart,
Calls me from the edge of the world.
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I give her my dream.
She dyes it red.
I give her my breath.
She turns it into rustling leaves.
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She calls me from the highest cloud.
Her chirp
Like a match flickering
In a new grave.
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•
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Bird, shaped
Like the insides
Of a yawning mouth.
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At daybreak,
When the sky turns clear and lucent
Like the water in which
They baptized a small child,
I climbed toward you.
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The earth grew smaller underneath.
The howling emptiness
Chilled my feet,
And then my heart.
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•
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Later, I dozed off
In the woods,
Nestled in a small clearing
With the mist for a lover,
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And dreamt I had
The stern eye
Of that bird
Watching me sleep.
Two Riddles
Hangs by a thread—
Whatever it is. Stripped naked.
Shivering. Human. Mortal.
On a thread finer than starlight.
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By a power of a feeling,
Hangs, impossible, unthinkable,
Between the earth and the sky.
I, it says. I. I.
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And how it boasts,
That everything that is to be known
About the wind
Is being revealed to it as it hangs.
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•
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It goes without saying . . .
What does? No one knows.
Goes mysterious, ah funereal,
Goes for the hell of it.
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If it has an opinion,
It keeps it to itself.
If it brings tidings,
It plays dumb, plays dead.
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No use trying to pin it down.
It’s elusive, of a retiring habit,
In a hurry of course, scurrying—
A blink of an eye and it’s gone.
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All that’s known about it,
Is that it goes goes
Without saying.
Brooms
    for Tomaz, Susan, and George
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    1
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Only brooms

Know the devil
Still exists,
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That the snow grows whiter
After a crow has flown over it,
That a dark dusty corner
Is the place of dreamers and children,
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That a broom is also a tree
In the orchard of the poor,
That a hanging roach there
Is a mute dove.
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    2
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Brooms appear in dream books
As omens of approaching death.
This is their secret life.
In public, they act like flat-chested old maids
Preaching temperance.
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They are sworn enemies of lyric poetry.
In prison they accompany the jailer,
Enter cells to hear confessions.
Their short end comes down
When you least expect it.
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Left alone behind a door
Of a condemned tenement,
They mutter to no one in particular,
Words like
virgin wind moon-eclipse
,
And that most sacred of all names:
Hieronymus Bosch.
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    3
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In this and in no other manner
Was the first ancestral broom made:
Namely, they plucked all the arrows
From the bent back of Saint Sebastian.
They tied them with the rope
On which Judas hung himself.
Stuck in the stilt
On which Copernicus
Touched the morning star . . .
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Then the broom was ready
To leave the monastery.
The dust welcomed it—
The old pornographer
Immediately wanted to
Peek under its skirt.
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    4
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The secret teaching of brooms
Excludes optimism, the consolation
Of laziness, the astonishing wonders
Of a glass of aged moonshine.
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It says: the bones end up under the table.
Bread crumbs have a mind of their own.
The milk is