Poetry

Come work with me awhile, Hayden,
I can use your company in the shed 
among tools your hands have never lost

Apollinaire experimented with audacious techniques for generating verse. On occasion he would sit in a café and weave overheard phrases into the composition. Read David Lehman’s translation of “Zone,” the central poem in Apollinaire’s...

I’m nearly eighteen, between ships, moping 
on the mess deck of Coast Guard Base 
Seattle. It’s Saturday night & I’m broke

How could they know,
how could anyone know
you were not formed by origins,

By now she knows that just because it’s thin
doesn’t mean it won’t hurt, that green is better 
than dead & dried. She needs to choose 

My love, the fox is in the yard.
The snow will bear his print a while,
then melt and go, but we who saw

I say to the lily asphodel,
onionweed—

The ghost of the nineteenth century
still stalks the eaves 
of the hurricane house, its clapboard sheaves

When I hear that boy sing, I said, every other
Boy becomes a disappointment. Tiny wince