Alan Shapiro

Broad leaves of bittersweet enveloping the dead and dying trees, flourishing up the trunks and out across the lower branches, to the few abandoned nests they haven’t yet invaded: every leaf now almost seeming to signal something to no one about the [...]

Pervasive ghostly whatnot of the felt invisible streaming back and forth of mass- less particles that anything with mass reels out of itself to reel in whatever’s smaller (how, by what means, pulling with what, or pressing?) along crossing and cris [...]

I used to feel like a new man After the day’s first brew. But then the new man I became Would need a tall one too. As would the new man he became, And the new one after him And so on and so forth till the new men made The dizzy room go dim [...]

I was the one dead inside the music— my voice forever in the cave of it, shaping the quick clay of syllables into songs of praise. I was the one dead inside the praise that praised you, “singing your praises.” I was the one dead in [...]

Spare me the judgment seat, the immaculate apron with its little chains. Spare me the old saw of a tooth for a tooth, and the pearly whites of the good doctor who brings the blinding bright light down. Spare me That eternal lidocaine. That leaden [...]

I stop beyond the pasture in the dark crease between hills that rise so steeply that the only light left is in the tops of trees. I stop where the snow I have to stomp through not to slip on will not break, bracing myself against rough [...]

Sun flickers through the trees beyond the window outside the room in which we sit all morning, talking around the table whose wooden surface quickens with shuttled light and shade, leaf shadow and sun both weaving and woven, each by each, as if the [...]