William Matthews

Most of the time he worked, a sort of sleepwith a purpose, so far as I could tell.
How he got from the dark of sleepto the dark of waking up I'll never know;
the lax sprawl sleep allowed himbegan to set from the edges in,
like a…

Eat all you want but don’t swallow it. —Archie Moore The ruth of soups and balm of sauces I renounce equally.
What Rorschach saw in ink I find in the buttery frizzle in the sauté pan, and I leave it behind, and the sweet peat-smoke tang of…

What did I think, a storm clutching a clarinetand boarding a downtown bus, headed for lessons?
I had pieces to learn by heart, but at twelveyou think the heart and memory are different."'It's a poor sort of memory that only…

How easily happiness begins by dicing onions.
A lump of sweet butter slithers and swirls across the floor of the sauté pan, especially if its errant path crosses a tiny slick of olive oil.
Then a tumble of onions.
This could mean…

Amidst the too much that we buy and throw away and the far too much we wrap it in, the bear found a few items of special interest—a honeydew rind, a used tampon, the bone from a leg of lamb.
He’d rock back lightly onto his rear paws and…

the only parts of the body the same size at birth as they'll always be. "That's why all babies are beautiful," Thurber used to say as he grew blind -- not dark, he'd go on to explain, but floating in a pale light always, a kind of…

The ones his age who shook my hand on their way out sent fear along my arm like heroin.
These weren’t men mute about their feelings, or what’s a body language for?
And I, the glib one, who’d stood with my back to my father’s body and…

A snake is the love of a thumb and forefinger.
Other times, an arm that has swallowed a bicep.
The air behind this one is like a knot in a child’s shoelace come undone while you were blinking.
It is bearing something away.

She discovers a finish of dust on the felt drawer-bottoms, despite the long time it's been since she opened it or wore lipstick.
Sometimes she's asked "What are you thinking of?" and she's so startled she says "Nothing,"…

So here the great man stood,
fermenting malice and poemswe have to be nearly as fierceagainst ourselves as henot to misread by their disguises.
Blue in dawn haze, the tamarackacross the road is new since Frostand thirty feet tall…

If you could turn the moon on a lathe, you would because you are curious.
And that would explain why the moon slivers, but explain it stupidly by not taking care to ask how the moon rounds.
And so we go, stupid ideas for feet.
The…

This is how we used to imagine the ocean floor: a steady snow of dead diatoms and forams drifting higher in the sunken plains, a soggy dust on the climbing underwater peaks.
But such a weather would build a parched earth, a ball of…

Sometimes the music is locked in the earth's body, matter- of-fact, transforming itself.
So our work could seem useless, even tautological, as if music were weather, as if there were never practice, finger-oil on the keys, dust in the…

"First, do no harm," the
Oath begins, but before she might enjoysuch balm, the docs had to harm her tumor.
It was large, rare, and so anomalousin its behavior that at first they mis-diagnosed it. "Your wife will die of…

I like divorce.
I love to composeletters of resignation; now and thenI send one in and leave in a lemon-hued Huff or a Snit with four on the floor.
Do you like the scent of a hollyhock?
To each his own.

No day is right for the apocalypse, if you ask a housewife in Talking Rock,
Georgia, or maybe Hop River,
Connecticut.
She is opening a plastic bag.

A defeated politician is in circulation again, as we say of coins, and his mouth is full of words.
His words have all been handled smooth.
They'd shrink, like lozenges, except some sweat from everyone who's had them is on them.
He…

Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's wife
He would have written sonnets all his life?
ON
AN

for Paul Levitt Be perpendicular to the basket, toes avid for the line.
Already this description is perilously abstract: the ball and basket are round, the nailhead centered in the centerplank of the foul-circle is round, and though the…

The Globe at the door, a jaunt to the square for the Sunday Times.
Later the path you made has healed, anyone may use it.
A good day for a fire.
Fast clouds tug their moorings of rain, bent like a wet field in the wind.

The lump of coal my parents teasedI'd find in my Christmas stockingturned out each year to be an orange,
for I was their sunshine.
Now I have one C. gave me,a dense node of sleeping fire.
I keep it where I read and…

Rather than hold his hands properly arched off the keys, like cats with their backs up,
Monk, playing block chords, hit the keys with his fingertips well above his wrists, shoulders up, wrists down, scarce room for the pencil, ground freshly…

Baudelaire: "The dead, the poor dead, have their bad hours."But the dead have no watches, no grief and no hours. At first not smoking took all my time:
I did ita little by little and hour by hour. Per diem.
Pro bono.
Cui…

A few rats are gnawing along the floor of the silo, but what are a few rats against this tower of food?
It takes 75,000 crocus blossoms to make a pound of saffron.
And after today out there in the heat, nobody dreams of food.
In…