In The Poetry

Apologia pro Vita Sua

One night in Paris I saw glowing in a small shopwindow a page of Ren

Paralysis

Laid out flat
in the back of the station wagon my father borrowed
I look up:
the leaves are immense,
green and golden with clear summer light
breaking through –
though I turn only my neck
I can see all of them
along this avenue that has no limits.

What does it matter
that I am only eyes
if I am to be carried
so lightly
under the [...]

Group portrait, Delft, late sixteenth century.

They opened the dikes five times that year to flood the land.
Cities were torched, the inhabitants bound and gagged,
then forced at lancepoint into the frozen canals.
I was executing yet another portrait of the public trustees of an orphanage
that their bald correctly-laced presences might shine
in remote museums a thousand years hence.
I [...]

Of poetry

Great poems are often extraordinarily simple.
They carry their openness
with both hands.
If there is a metaphor lounging in a doorway
they step briskly past.
The boom of generals
and presidents with their rhetoric manuals
will go on sowing the wind.

The great poems are distrustful of speech.
Quietly,
like someone very old
who has only a few hours left [...]

Why the minotaur is always sad

So many years underground,
his head dizzy from bumping all those memory-clouds.
Always to be the centrepiece
of someone else’s puzzle.
His endless consumption of women
didn’t help much.
And so this morning he has arrived in his kingdom:
a wise gathering of rocks,
a little girl trying to paint flowers on the pebbles
but the waves keep [...]