English

Until wolf-light I will count my sheep,
Adumbrated, uncomedic, as they are.
One is perdu, two, qualm, three
Is sprawl, four, too late,

Night is already a thirsty county in Texas,
Salt flat and unremitting
Blacktop dry as my mouth,
And your elastic vowels, my genial,

My electric ghost, my
Radio"s lonely station. Because the spectacle
Of suffering corrupts us, all punishments

If I stand
alone in the snow
it is clear
that I am a clock

how else would eternity
find its way around

A man with binoculars
fixed a shape in the field
and we stopped and saw

the albino buck browsing
in the oats — white dash
on a page of green,

flick of a blade
cutting paint to canvas.
It dipped its head

and green effaced the white,
bled onto the absence that
the buck was — animal erasure.

Head up again, its sugar legs
pricked the turf, pink
antler prongs brushed at flies.

Here in a field was the imagined world
made visible — a mythical beast

We were sitting there, and
I made a joke about how
it doesn"t dovetail: time,
one minute running out
faster than the one in front
it catches up to.
That way, I said,
there can be no waste.
Waste is virtually eliminated.

To come back for a few hours to
the present subject, a painting,
looking like it was seen,
half turning around, slightly apprehensive,
but it has to pay attention
to what"s up ahead: a vision.
Therefore poetry dissolves in
brilliant moisture and reads us
to us.

If the sea is a cathedral, a tide pool
is a chapel. Sculpins dart under the wind
that blusters their cupped oceans.
Sculpted by wave on rock, their pockets of salt
grow thin from the rain, the suffocating
fresh water. Sculpin and hermit crab and limpet
endure the sea"s absence, the lost comfort
of constant temperature, while the unconceived
sky drums the roof over their pooled world
with litanies of unbreathable torrent.

Christ, I have no praise for you.
Beyond saying a vodka-wrecked troller

— Katounakia, 2007

The cave itself is pleasantly austere,
with little clutter — nothing save
a narrow slab, a threadbare woolen wrap,
and in the chipped-out recess here
three sooty icons lit by oil lamp.
Just beyond the dim cave"s aperture,
a blackened kettle rests among the coals,
whereby, each afternoon, a grip
of wild greens is boiled to a tender mess.
The eremite lies prostrate near
two books — a gospel and the Syrian"s

Change is the new,

improved

word for god,

lovely enough
to raise a song

or implicate

a sea of wrongs,
mighty enough,

like other gods,

to shelter,
bring together,

and estrange us.

Please, god,
we seem to say,

change us.

Beneath her nest,
a shrew"s head,
a finch"s beak
and the bones
of a quail attest

the owl devours
the hour,
and disregards
the rest.

He —

You saw the way her body looked at me
all address
calling me down
she was so
well-turned,
curve and volume
her body presented itself —
Clay —
I could mold it

She —

You were taboo
not totem —
covered her
though your wing gave no shelter

Your pale plumage
became shadow
Your beak caught
in the net of her hair

He —

When I entered her
her death became my life

The city humid, the church rusty and Baroque, and the directions appalling,
the Miami sky turned gray as a blanket, and soon tropical rain was falling;
the priest repeatedly invoked the Beast in View, as if he were stalling;
and in the back a few ushers whipped out their cell phones and started calling.
What of the palm scrub, through which mildewed creatures came crawling,
or the two cousins from Chicago, who at the reception couldn"t stop brawling?
All weddings are madness, and except for the sherbet-hued bridesmaids not even a little enthralling.