In her book, she said the guiding principle was guarding against irreparable losses; she’d managed to live so as to avoid any major cause of regret. Anyone who’s done that, raise your hand: you’re excused from this poem. As for us who remain, let’s go around the circle and list our regrets. For the stuporous,…
I shimmied my way up the thick vine like a cord plugged into heaven—electricity crackled down the line between my hands, reflexes tightening the fingers—I took it as a message from the gods, onwards! So up I went clapping hands ankles knees to the breeze as the cord arced left and right in the sky—…
I. The garden of Eden. Also called earthly p., to distinguish it from the heavenly p. First She is seventeen, he twenty-one. She is a green girl, Ophelic but believing Herself a witch-queen, while he plays Edmund, Bastard and natural. Sitting on the cliff’s edge, her Back to the village where floats down…
On the stage Robert Schumann is getting drunk With tempestuous love. You remember what it is to listen to passionate Nineteenth-century music, a clamor of argument and struggle Invoking the old gods, thunderbolt and hurricane, At the moment of their dying, and here in the lightning Is Clara whose father forbids her to marry…
Corpses push up through thawing permafrost, as I scrape salmon skin off a pan at the sink; on the porch, motes in slanting yellow light undulate in air. Is Venus at dusk as luminous as Venus at dawn? Yesterday I was about to seal a borax capsule angled up from the bottom of a decaying…
Syringes, ampoules, feathers, finger foods, driftwood, A purple sheen on the water, obscene eddies, mud on the banks and pine nests. This morning I saw another omen: there’s always something, usually just one thing, An egret or an ibis. But it’s the things in conjunction that make meaning. Five days ago there was…
I think the last time I saw you may have been that time near the church. I still like that church despite this, though the church is also other things to me. In fact, more and more I wish I remembered those other things that are called permanent, inviolable, impregnable to assault or trespass, secure…
For what it’s worth, once I left the convent, but I never left the Church. It’s true, I left Ireland in a hurry, too. You could say I broke the habit, or to quote my da’ “I pulled a rabbit out o’ my arse” and realized I put the cart before the horse and wasn’t…
I. What appears untidy and lacking in design is in fact intentional: quiet milkweed beside the conflagration of red fireweed; the brackish Schuylkill feeding stately oaks. John knew the author lays his borders, then steps back. General Washington, strolling the overgrown river trail, pursed his lips; what sort of father lets his seed run wild,…
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