The perfect ease of grain time enough to spill the flavor of a woman carried through the rain. Honey-talk tongues down home dreams a rushed but shapely prayer. Evening lips part to hush questions raised at dawn. The melon yields another slice. Fingers understand. Ecstasy becomes us all. Red cherries become jam. Deep juvenile sleep…
At that time I didn’t understand snow, the absence inside July, water and what holds the water in. Heard “It takes more than a forest to make a tree” in no one’s voice. By then the word meridian was extinct, echo without a face to place it, make it stay. Birds’ theories of heat hunch…
I first heard of Paul Muldoon through the affectionate enthusing of Seamus Heaney, who donned his conspiratorial mien — as if agents of some imagined opposition might be lurking near — and confided that his somewhat younger compatriot was “the real thing.” I sought the work out, though I’ll confess I was some time coming…
It’s been suggested: well kept lawns and fences, white porch swings and toast by the fire. It’s been requested: puppies, a window of blossoming pear trees and a place for robins to nest. But I know that somewhere, out there the town is lit. The players begin to make music in all the…
My eyes must be open because light through the woof of the hut’s weave shows my arm in pin shivers. What wakes me? A howl unfolds outside, fear-in-the-mouth, a breathing trill, certifying the silence after. Sheep in a barn as flimsy as mine drum panic that my bones pick up, an arthritis of fear….
Marilyn Hacker, Squares and Courtyards, poems: Precise, haunting, elegant, and elegiac, Hacker’s ninth volume celebrates her community of friends in Paris and New York and their courage as they live with HIV and cancer. (Norton)
Joyce Peseroff, Mortal Education, poems: Peseroff’s third book of poems recalls the raw experience of mortality, met through the illness and death of a friend, the context of history, and the tensions and pleasures of family life. Carnegie Mellon has also reissued Peseroff’s The Hardness Scale as part of its Classic Contemporary Series. In Ploughshares,…
Confetti lifts over the fairground. Happy music, played to make us happy, slows its parade, dims as it pivots at the curb. While I hide in the copse, the outlines lighten, my skeleton, luminescent. I take the thick cup in both hands, drink urgently. Warm wind plays litter across the yard. My company’s shattered glass,…
August 25. I’ve really had very little chance to pick up this notebook in the three weeks since I took up my new duties in this village with the unpronounceable name of Asvestohori. My group is officially assigned the task of distributing medical supplies to our troops quartered here and the task of supervising the…
No products in the cart.