She’s in the purple cone flowers, in the yarrow turning brown, nodding to lemon lilies. I hear her slighting a neighbor: “She’s flat as an ironing board.” Nana hands me an iron. “Get your head out of those books, they’ll fill you up with words.” She’s in my word pie, my alphabet soup. The day…
And the craft that createth a semblance —Morris, “Sigurd the Volsung” (1876) I think about a tiger. Twilight exalts The vast and never-resting library And seems to make the shelves of books recede; Powerful, innocent, new-made, stained with blood, He will move through his rainforest and morning, Will leave his spoor upon the muddy bank…
How long can one man’s lifetime last? —Wang Wei Long enough, he said to our tears, to know all of it is a gift. We wanted to hold him back from the dying he was busy doing, nine months of working his way through the Book of Subtractions: first the relished taste of food and…
Had he been able to sing… It was almost a song. The phrases enveloped in his voice’s flesh Were of the hardness of a writing near at hand. He would note: the kernel. The stone On which he constructs a temple of music. A school of gongs. How to hold the earth in place. Which…
Dearest, I am happy in the fire. The lighting is spectacular, snaking tongues, a rain of sparks, and the moans of the damned thrill me. There is no death here. God’s love revives us at the brink of extinction. The torments are cunningly varied but there is not one that does not correspond to a…
The chilly blood stands still around my heart. —Virgil Self-banished to the Chalcis desert for three years, Hieronymus delved deeply into his sacred texts, sleeping little and eating less, lingering for hours in the hush of dawn to recite a litany of vows, to compose copious epistles to church elders, and to purify his sunburned…
So you think you can bear me, now, do you? Carry my limp body through centuries Of sand (soft, made from ground shells, or souls As some have claimed), likewise, across that blue That is the paradise-never you deem We shall inhabit, in which I don cream And no clothes, or just a muslin dream-come-true…
I am like the trees not ruined exactly but shorn of ornament and destitute of motivation it is possible to find both beauty and truth in their pure forms and I would like to do so in myself if time could be persuaded to hold off its heartless green
Automobiles rout the Eternal City, their exhaust peeling like slow acid the skin and cartilage off statues, slipping the spirit from its moorings, as a million times a day, humans stand, backs pressed to the wall in the narrow streets, to let cars pass. One step, two, sometimes maybe even a string of uninterrupted steps,…
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