Venice, 1448 Installed in a high wooden pulpit, the professor Drones on aloud from his book, was it Stephen of Antioch’s spin on Abbas’ translation of Galen the Greek? The music of it all, anyway, the muscular rhythms, Phrase knit to phrase with the delicate Sinew of assonance—! The students in the foreground milling about,…
That’s what my mother called her dimestore pads of Irish Linen, each sheet with its trace of red gum threaded along the top, thumbed off for elegance. For special, she’d say, to be used for letters, not lists, to be used to write about the weather one day at a time. But she got only…
Virginia, after a WPA photo Leafless tree shadow scribbles its face and shadows of deflated bushes flood the yard, an arrogant silver squalor so riddled and clumped it seems a crowd had barged about, then despaired of raising a response from such a blank and pointless house. Bare weatherboard of equivocal color, snaggle-toothed shutters. The…
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…
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