You wear those shoes like a shy mother.
You are a shy mother.
Mother, it’s snobbish nonsense;
all these chanson tramps
just prance prance prance about town
Night-drunk bees s(t)unned on October’s panes,
Their dried husks in the windshield of a late-night thought,
Home is just a breadth of road away.
Each limousine the pinwheel of a funeral.
50% cuts in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
The night nurse easing your thin bottom
The night nurse quibbling with the old GP:
The lobbied family becalmed around
Everything morphined: They more or less agree
Expostulate up! up! Route 9, Will.
Ignore the totality of immortality.
Drink up this anti-pastoral.
Hail the Just-a-Buck and Minnow Motors.
Translated by DENIS HIRSON
A little man walks
Through the golden dust
It is a summer’s morning
A morning fresh and mild
As other mornings, other sorrows
He walks across roads
Where no one else walks
With a tiny wooden coffin
Tucked under his arm
Translated by DENIS HIRSON
On the unbolted gate to the garden of the dead I wrote
Voi che entrate and was pulled short swift and sharply
As the strain of writing in an unknown tongue rather than
One of those words from another time,
I think, as my walk circles back
towards my house, the wind, an accomplice
It’s only 6 a.m. and already my sun
salutation is ten minutes behind
mountain standard time just means more
All the small griefs, the petty slights, the imagined
worst things, he’s placed them each
Pin prick of pink in the solution to ensure you struck a vein,
before you push the plunger in. Brief burn then spreading
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