Arriving in December on a Greyhound from Paducah, you saw the usual sun rising on your right over the bowed houses of Dearborn as a wafer of moon descended on your left behind the steaming rail yards wakening for work. “Where are we?” you asked. In 1948 people still talked to each other even when…
As a child, as little more than an infant still learning numbers and words, I went to sleep after praying for uncles and aunts, for the living and the dead, with one hand in my mother’s hand through the bars of the cot, while I held in the other a bronze statuette of Mary given…
“Everything changes but the avant-garde.” —Paul Valéry A few words are left us from the beginning. Thank you, God, for allowing me a little to think again this morning. Touch my face, touch this scarred heart. Here, touch this upturned face as wind as light. So they labored for three or four decades to turn…
translated by Lyn Coffin, with Leda Pugh The earth opened wide. Rain, a doctor, dripped remedies. All night, moving down the mountainsides were molten seas. You, my fevered country, now must spend your last moments caught in delirium’s coil— peacefully, tenderly, you ask at the end: Where’s the boil? 2 My soul, your wind died…
translated by Clare Cavanagh When he described the park, the path, sick fires glowed in his cooling eyes, his voice grew stronger and his hands tried to be what they once were, when deft squirrels trustingly took sugar from them. Now I’m here. And everything is as he’d remembered: the yellow forsythia, the poplars’ shady…
I was worn out, lost, and sixteen in China at 6 p.m., everyone suddenly in a purchasing frenzy, when he stopped me with a smile that just turned me upside down: gold caps on one side, gaps on the other. I could tell he was more human than most people, or more kind. He was…
As the work of Rosanna Warren reminds us, to be a poet is to be a writer of poems. The forces of abstraction that threaten always to turn real individual artworks into mere manifestations of moods or (worse) theories or (worst of all) institutions—these forces go limp before poems so brilliantly made. The sculptures are…
Strange arachnid, distant cousin of deer ticks and potato bugs, those armored pellets that live between bark and wood, stone and dirt. Unlike them you wash up hapless on beaches more a bowl than a shoe. You come in squads after mating in the waters of your birth, dragging the useless scabbard of your tail….
Broken tulip, 17th-century Holland The plain white petal between her finger and thumb belled into a sail pregnant with nothing it could bear, then split, dark seamed, its length. A whole fleet foundered in the field around her: bands of white tulips, red and yellow, diluted to shadow beneath a setting moon splinted against the…
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