Matthew Buchwald

For twenty miles a lion followed her
Through the lonely desert
While she played on the mandolin, a sad song
And drank wine from a jar.
...

Men are Homeric, women are ineffable.
Let Solomon or the bards hallow the woman,
Historians and heros shall judge the man,
The pathetic man, who wept, tearing out his hair,
...

A cat runs away
It swallows the stars like a sacred charm,
It has always been old
Immune to the cold
...

Daybreak found Mabee in the jungle,
Cutting his way through the rainforest,
Making for the foothills of the high country.
He paused, listening for the telltale sound
...

My head has become as soft as a tidal marsh,
The clammers cut into it, making slushy sounds,
Every day and every night they dig,
They squish like the valves of time.
...

Why is it that the thing which we hate
is also the cause of our happiness?
The instinct which inspired my hatred
of the city, now brings me joy.
...

Looming before a horizon,
Far from equatorial seas,
Of charcoal gray and indigo,
Repeating bars of ivory,
...

The stealthy fragrances of Northern lights
Are stilled by the obtuse angles of your thighs
And sleep, tender and sated.
Your breast is a terra-cotta rose
...

It's a dark cavern where the highway weeps
Sadly yielding grey cinders to the dust,
Where the moon on the grim river creeps:
It's a seething crater, a hole in the Earth's crust.
...

do you remember
Leon Trotsky in Central Park
holding a catcher's mitt
for the mermaids from Weeki Wachee Springs
...

The nubile Bacchic dancers,
Look how they tear the cruel tyrant apart,
And how helpless he now is to resist their assault;
Merciless and unbending, they've grasped him by the arms, by the legs,
...

Scarcely below the clouds, far off this strait
The cries of marooned jacks he heard impart
An epistle. His alarm as they wailed,
Sank in the torrid brine and went unheard.
...

I'm the dog.
I spent my whole life hoboin' cross the country—with him along too, and he's always been willing to share a meal, even though sometimes we went hungry not knowing where our next feed was gonna come from riding the rails or camping in one of the jungles.
He's just a small feller, he's old, got holes worn in his clothes, is crooked, awkward, stiff in his getalong, stubborn as a mule, and has a comical face, and straw colored hair sticking out all over, and is a little hard to look at; but nobody's kinder than he is, and nobody's more loyal, excepting maybe me.
No, anyone who thinks that he ain't loyal to his friends ought to see him when he's down and out, scaring up a load of grub and sharing the first portion, and begging for a second serving, and sharing some of that too and filling his pockets with leftovers and biscuits just in case either of us would want a treat later.
...

They call me Johnny the gimp
My mother tried to kill me the day I was born
And left me a cripple for life
Locked in a permanent struggle just to survive
...

What once was great is now no more
Than a shadow of the past,
The glory that we had in store
Won't come to us at last.
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Beneath tall sea cliffs lies a grave
Concealed from view inside a cave,
Besides a stone, the only trace
That tells where was the hiding place
...

Cradles of dirt and sighs of dust,
Limbs fall into the gizzards of the earth:
From end to end the cradle rocks
Propelled by dismal winds.
...

A Sonoran Assassin Bug Is Impaled on a Cactus Spine and Eaten by a Tarantula

This plumage that sprouts on barren immensity,
Capsized medusa with upturned stingers
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O listen well to what I say,
If you go down by the shore,
The maiden loitering by the lake,
Was not of woman born.
...

If we assume the existence of scorpions on the Moon,
But looking backwards are unable to find that heliotropes
Were resurrected with indolence or anguish; if we assume
...