It is not the fall of Nineveh. Not the sliding of the earth, the clashing of the icy stars. Nothing as bad as that. It is the silence, now, of a little black cat. The bowl where he ate. The chair where he sat. He’s curled in a ball on the laundry basket. The cat-nip…
The soldier plant is perverse. Common to civilizations, it is like nothing else in Nature. Blown down upon the richest earth, its seeds will not root: nourished by blood and tears, they will not ripen; even prayed over, celebrated in myth, imagined as history, tended to a fault, they never flower.
Toward evening, as the light failed and the pear tree at my window darkened, I put down my book and stood at the open door, the first raindrops gusting in the eaves, a smell of wet clay in the wind. Sixty years ago, lying beside my father, half asleep, on a bed of pine boughs…
He has bribed the thorns to guard his poppies. They intoxicate the valley with their forbidden scent, reddening the horizon till it is almost as if they aren’t there. Maybe the guns guard only the notorious dreams in his head. The weather is kind to every bloom, & the fat greenish bulbs form a galaxy…
Looking back at the table of contents of an earlier issue of Ploughshares that I guest-edited some twenty years ago, I was surprised by how few of the writers were then discoveries for me. Two certainly were. Their poems had almost nothing in common: her three poems were straightforward & hard-edged; the details came out…
Students all too commonly misconstrue the poem in which Sappho calls that man equal to a god, who, opposite you, leans in and whispers, etcetera, tending to assume it’s about two people: speaker/loved one? Beloved and man near her, bending close to her, whom the poet hears as, heads close together, they laugh softly? Wait:…
For Dewey Huston Tell me again about the butterflies, old friend of my father, bringer of tales, the gully, mossy rocks of the streambed, a cool breeze off the glacier high above, and suddenly butterflies everywhere as if the air you breathed were blossoming. I’ve seen so many things, you said. I wish I could…
Although Philip Levine turns eighty this year, he continues to be one of our most energetic and prolific American poets. A working poet for more than a half century, he is still writing and publishing new poems, mentoring younger poets, taking on editorial projects like this issue of Ploughshares, giving readings all over the country,…
To live without memory is to have each hour as a pane of air for canvas and the view from a window to paint: amber-honey cold mornings: humbled by evening:: variation and variation of ambiguous figments—ziggurat beehive auroras—flicker and go out. All history may as well be in these brushstrokes: the hand has not rested…
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