We were walking past your dead grandfather’s house, and I left you as if through a door in the air. I wanted to tell you, but you were speaking…

  What I cannot name I almost never think about  or what love has joined together, I said, and approaching you is like a light coming through the place where…

  The sleeper summer is airing out its torn tendrils, but we think of night sirens, a black sky like a record, the white tooth of Republic Square bare and…

  I find graffiti again and again on different walls, a leitmotif not a landmark: giraffe-people with swirling eyes, initials added together inside hearts, a rabbit as tall as me,…

  You come to a clearing like the knoll before the ancient temple in Bar’am a village emptied of its inhabitants still waiting to return. You reach that grassy open…

  6. With an eight-stringed harp. In the grave Who can give thanks? I will try with my fingers to pluck the chord to please you. Though I have never…

  Mornings I walk among trees, walk away my wanting, long nights, teeth clenched, waiting; stormy nights, light slashes the sky, my body restless, succumbing finally to my own hands,…

  We know only that the curtains fly like sails, the earth keeps spinning, tilts over and back, rains come, leaves shrivel and die, the snow gathers then melts away,…

  He’s gone, the voice says. Before I can ask where to, the call disconnects. I find him sleeping peacefully through the ride on old city roads, the crowd’s whisper…

Tr. from the Galician by Neil Anderson   If I had drunk more milk as a girl the magpies who settle in the brush wouldn’t mock me, the bats wouldn’t…

Tr. from the Galician by Neil Anderson   They don’t build their nest under the roof tiles anymore. They fly circles around the shed, they come and go with mud…

  the washing-machine repairman asks if I’ve saddled my sons with biblical names on purpose the plumber presses me to admire his sculptures the electrician wonders if I have skills…