birds have got these world-counteracting smart-alec knacks: techno-turbojet shoulders and hup… they alone got plucked off lesbos on the salty sea breeze, while the wingless and flightless were powerless, even to get a mention in the press. feeling guilty about my rightful guiltlessness, i ate nonetheless and drank, played scrabble, slept in. lesbos under a […]

In time all cities blur and connect as each street remembers another, remembers the downward pressure on your temple as the plane rises, rises, as the lights of one city are gurgled by fog, and what’s left is one more night between time zones. What glow here. What unbreakable seams. You know the earth, like […]

Standing at pump four of the garage in Ballydehob filling the Honda with diesel, I want the counter to stop at a round number, a whole euro, so if the tank’s getting full and the flow’s clicking off I restart, easing out my finger then tightening the trigger until the digit ticks to zero. I […]

When I hear what is happening in America I turn back on myself, crouch on the landing where no light falls and wait for the piglet in her sniffle to unlung. Like I know the full farmyard of her discontents and which corn snack to invoke against rainfall, I know no bailiff is coming to […]

Whosoever has pushed a tear of bread into a glossy pool of gravy has entered history paying the ticket price, playing statues as they lift to their mouths a fine brine of self, striking the figures of those minor gods who light the mineral tapes of creek and cliff: the shirtless walker raising his palm […]

This poet once told me, poetry is pure. You have to approach words with the fear of God the way you hold an ancient Torah scroll found in an archaeological dig. And underground, in the trenches of meaning, poets engrave letter by letter in a tablet like idol worshippers in the name of the holiest […]

for JH We are half way through the dark time.              They know it in their roots, the winter trees: What am I working at, an old poet,              sitting over the keys? Today, I caught a glimpse of my face              in a photograph and made out pathos in the lines of my mouth […]

You can have all the other sadnesses, the yellow leaf on the burnt path, the silverware hopelessly scratched, the evening news and the morning news, the funeral, the rotgut, the crappy tag sale, the dead fish seasoning the shore, the memorial, the wake, the Ono no Komachi poems, all of April 1998, the lunar new […]

This word needs to be seen in order to be understood. In the Chinese language, it’s not enough to work out the meaning by speaking and listening. Most likely, there will be some misunderstanding. By comparison, it’s harder to misread a text. In modern Chinese, she has revealed appropriately her fate, as if it were […]

Three days Kiyoshi lived in the red maple which swelled across the Shogun’s garden. Inkstone wet with mist or spit, he painted a single dark character on each leaf until the tree was one shuffling testimony of love for the Shogun’s daughter. Together they sat an hour reading the tree. A thousand poems came and […]

i pretended to be ill on the days of the school parade. before she had me figured out, my mother would kiss the back of my neck to see if i needed my temperature taken. the days when i was truly ill, her hands would grab brown glass bottles with liquids that were sometimes yellow, […]

Tough little angels of sound are howling off the rich surfaces of the water tonight, but do not let that worry you. The river Avon is bright black and yet it is not worried. Harsh little ripples of what is not in fact cold sweat lick and etch around the edges as it goes bending […]

the dead rat was uninjured. rigor mortis had set in, freezing the tail to a loop about the circumference of my forearm. probably it had eaten poison. when it rains (which it sometimes does for days) the snails come out, in liquid eye-tiaras and at night i saw a car with blue under-lights parked outside […]