Hello, readereaper. It’s certainly been a while. May I take your coat? It is four a.m. and my parents and sister are gone to North Carolina for two weeks’ vacation, which means I have the house to myself. So: I come out of the bathroom and the cat is sitting on top of the humidifier…
Only the colorless eye is undistracted: a lake Rubbed blue by twilight is not blue to the eye cast blue And a violet sunset cannot be refracted Violet through the violet eye. A crimson retina Won’t conceive the paint of a rigging blooded by dusk Or the stain a star makes, cutting its patina Crimson…
The tree bore the efflorescence of October apples like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed. The wind blew in cold sweet gusts, and the burning taste of fresh snow came with the gradual dark down through the goldenrod. The blue and scarlet sky was gently losing its color, as if from…
Sharper than the scythe, which, like the ladder and the boards I couldn’t lift, was long. And quicker, since it was smaller, and, swung in an arc, would sing. I was the age of Latin in school, mollis for mullein, the flannel of whose leaf girls would rouge their Quaker cheeks with, for whom vanity,…
A low sound in the hollows fills low places, fills hollows, carves a hollow from the right place or hollows being in place, a sound I heard in a strange place, in a strange state, just off the road in southern Utah, just over the border, just off the desert, where a field of wheat…
It’s September: I’ve moved into town, into the attic of an old barn—a big open room I reach by climbing a ladder that rises through a hole in the floor. The room is long and high, with windows at each end, a row of skylights that leak rain, and shake and chatter in the northeast…
off-season home of a circus elephant Here, the past forgets its boundaries, shines through abandoned objects: the caved tin roof of the slave quarters, wind-beaten planks and rusted knives scattered in dust and sand. Soon, the elephant will make her slow way down this path, graze among the ruins and pines; each step an…
Rita Dove, On the Bus with Rosa Parks, poems: In her seventh collection, Dove mines American mythologies and histories to brilliant effect, arriving at relevant and artful poems that stir and sing. (Norton)
I am a good confidante, and I’ll tell you the secret: never offer advice, merely listen. You may repeat, ratify, sympathize, query, even divulge a tidbit or two, whip up the objective correlative, but you must never give an opinion about what your friend should do next. Never, never, never. The summer of my separation…
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