You have been here before and you remember the empty streets, the fire, and after that the stairs crowded with bells. This pregnant woman was your wife, she laughed—and whispered the story to her belly: how did the deafness come? To the sound of bells— you bent to tie your shoes to the sound of…
It seems insane now, but she’d be standing soaked in school day morning light, her loose-leaf notebook, flickering at the bus stop, and we almost trembled at the thought of her mouth filled for a moment with both of our short names. I don’t know what we saw when we saw her face, but at…
We will eventually be archaeology, but now in America I tell my young daughter the new headlights are a bluish-white instead of the smoky yellow of my upbringing. She’s busy with her bubble-making, her dig in the flowerbed, her pantomimed banquet, phantom guests dining on her small handfuls of weeds and grasses. Precisely, the lit…
I saw once, in a rose garden, a remarkable statue of the Roman she-wolf and her twins, a reproduction of an ancient statue—not the famous bronze statue, so often copied, in which the wolf’s blunt head swings forward toward the viewer like a sad battering ram, but an even older statue, of provenance less clear….
Just as I’m going into the native seed store, where the ancient seeds of the world’s various peoples are kept and sold so that they can perhaps root in tomorrow’s ground, a young man who was just on the other side of the street, yelling furiously at his stoned friend on the other, quiets the…
I don’t know, he said, I guess it’s something I’d like, an ocean with such ugly fish down there dark, ones with barbs and lantern lights affixed to their heads. It’s all I got, said the voice. And this wet suit to go with it, this backpack of oxygen, this camera, this knife. Be careful….
www.youtube.com So, here’s Edith Piaf, widow and orphan, fists clenched and tipped forward for emphasis: No, she sings, I regret nothing, not the good, not the bad. And you want to believe it too, you’re trying to believe it, and you who should have married or moved sing along. You who could have done more…
Last night’s rain has filled the fields with cornflowers, blue-bright as moons in children’s books, all milky light. They seem, my father says, the kind of color that could show up in the night. Cornflowers wilt in heat. By noon the sun will burn the fields green, as if no bloom had known them. I…
As we change the past, so are we changed. These words, from Eleanor Wilner’s essay "Playing the Changes," are striking for how profoundly they speak not only to the poet and to the practice of poetry—indeed the practice of all art—but for how appropriately they also reveal the human situation—or at least, that impulse within us…
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