Love came Upon such silent feet, She seemed a dream: I offered her no seat. But when she stirred To part the door and leave, I heard And ran to call her back. By then she was an incorporeal dream Lost in the night; the gleam Of her lamp-flame, on the road far ahead AContinue reading “Leaving the Fair”
Tag Archives: poem
Distant Voices
Young men stand on street corners, their clothes expensive, their cars impractical, wildly colored, and they will do anything but put a piece of another piece in a certain place. —Toi Derricotte, from “Whitman, Come Again to the Cities” (This shot is from “Visitors,” a new, ongoing series of photographs taken on the Boston subway.)
Builder
Over the half-finished houses night comes. The builders stand on the roof. It is quiet after the hammers, the pulleys hang slack. Giants, the roofwalkers, on a listing deck, the wave of darkness about to break on their heads. The sky is a torn sail where figures pass magnified, shadows on a burning deck. —AdrienneContinue reading “Builder”
Swallowed Like Jewels
WHITE, WHITE COLLARS We work in this building and we are hideous in the fluorescent light, you know our clothes woke up this morning and swallowed us like jewels and ride up and down the elevators, filled with us, turning and returning like the spray of light that goes around dance-halls among the dancing fools.Continue reading “Swallowed Like Jewels”
Flagged
Poverty is what happens at the end of any story, including this one, When there are too many stories. When you can believe in all of them, & so believe in none; When one condition is as good as any other. —Larry Levis, from “Elegy with a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage“
New Deal
Here in the electric dusk your naked lover tips the glass high and the ice cubes fall against her teeth. It’s beautiful Susan, her hair sticky with gin, Our Lady of Wet Glass-Rings on the Album Cover, streaming with hatred in the heat as the record falls and the snake-band chords begin to break likeContinue reading “New Deal”
Esperanzas
Ocean which I pushed up with my fingers so I could touch the orange sand below and white mountain which is not white but for getting caught in the cold Stay here where it is warm and where the sun shines, for later celestial garlands of dead light will draw you into the cold forContinue reading “Esperanzas”
Voyagers
See on the canals Those vessels sleeping. Their mood is adventurous; It’s to satisfy Your slightest desire That they come from the ends of the earth. — The setting suns Adorn the fields, The canals, the whole city, With hyacinth and gold; The world falls asleep In a warm glow of light. —Charles Baudelaire, fromContinue reading “Voyagers”
Showrooms
Day after day, along with his placid automobiles, that well-groomed sallow young man had been waiting for me, as in the cheerful, unchanging weather of a billboard—pacing the tiles, patting his tie, knotting, un- knotting the façade of his smile while staring out the window. He was so bad at the job he reminded meContinue reading “Showrooms”
Chris Bronsk 