Il temporal foco e l'eterno veduto hai, figlio, e sei venuto in parte dov’ io per me più oltre non discerno. —Purgatorio, XXVII, 127 When a mind goes, how much we never knew goes with it. Always singular, the self in its familiar guises moves among us, breaking bread, spending a Sunday on the Battenkill,…
I lift my hands to my face my hand's the biggest thing around and filled with rivers it has stems I can see through to the dark fuzzy air I hold my hand to my face and down below I feel my legs curl up to my chest I look out at the door of…
Distance doesn't matter. Not dreams of home or morning filtered through a darker pane or the timbre of his voice in every room or blaming every cruelty on the place or letters no longer expected, unreceived or pigeons streaming bloodless through the sky. Only this wafer of unbending light redeemed a song by all the…
Twenty-one turkeys amaze our eyes, come traveling north from the Berkshire Museum (Art and Natural History). It says there boa constrictors do not harm humans. False Laocoön! not to mention Eden. On Route 7 nobody stops; but if they had a gun (or a camera in Yellowstone) they'd stop to shoot the hideous buffalo. Turkeys…
Then. No. Now. A long silk scarf of voice, pulled through the loop of throat— Jo Stafford singing on the radio. He wants so much to hear a voice like that, and it exists, as simply as creation, the way the world provides an image for the feeling that's richer than the feeling, so that…
Have we grown old before our time folding our hands without a smile or a piece of bread like monkeys, our faces unrecognizably human? We jump and clap to be cursed and mocked. And when we speak no one pays attention. And when we sleep even a bird can wake us. Israel, 1989
She sits in her strong middle age Near his white and iron cage And bites her lip, hearing him moan. She cannot make her strength his own. She cannot answer to the call Of that deep voice. When he was small, O red-faced cry that she could still! O groping mouth that she could fill!…
I. The fields are frozen, swart rows banded white with ribbons of ice, each a horizon planted with a sun. The station wagon's old back end takes the ruts shocklessly, waking everyone, even the potential son- in-law whose carousing late last night merited a bowed-head-in-hands. The light scissoring at him, however, is not unexpected. “If…
Wanting, the enemy cast off, wades in a dark pool outside. Wanting, the oppressor, grows anklets and beads in a wet heat. Charity, the curse in love with patriots, gives all her possessions to the night, takes off her robes and waits on the narrow bed for ruin. The slightest cusp of wind disturbing both…
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