Forecasts say prepare for rain, so you will—
will keep at the ready tarp and cord, tents
and candles. And you will drink to the gulls
circling and the May sun high above rocks
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
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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