When the new year came with whole flocks of doves
and jackdaws falling dead upon the fields,
landfills and roofs blackened with wings; the lakes
silvered with drumfish, their bellies bloated,
Arid stick of trail, waving ocotillo: O mottled cactus branch pointing beyond the pictographs of water sources—
I begin with Byron & Tennyson
& watch my students bury
their heads on desks; they rest
easier than the deceased. Dear 2PAC,
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
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