I. All that forever is scattered from a man. Home no more at twilight to set his sandals Side by side on the hearth and hug his children. Forever changes everything: He is folded into another being, a tree perhaps. The atoms that were his mind far-sprinkled In space, his life a banquet of snow…
On the rough diamond, the hand-cut field below the dog lot and barn, we rehearsed the strict technique of bunting. I watched from the infield, the mound, the backstop as your left hand climbed the bat, your legs and shoulders squared toward the pitcher. You could drop it like a seed down either base line….
Did I not, from larva, grow a shell, then crawl from it, skinless, until like the cicada I left my theologies and causes clasped to trees — so why have my maps and chronicles brought me again to a green lathe? Do I still wear the same threaded syntax? My eyes still turn from blue…
ONE Mary Ashlyn looked out the long narrow window and was surprised to see long narrow needles of brilliant rain falling wildly across her October garden. Brilliant long needles of flashing cruel rain, too bright, the sun was indeed still shining, and when Mary Ashlyn looked quickly at the sky, it was smooth and blue,…
This is the future, what we feared. It could have been worse. For instance, the woman you spied on in your first madness, you a boy of seventeen, is gone, but walk down any street and look for that golden incandescence in some window, see a woman there combing her hair and dreaming of a…
From here you can see the herds come down from the mountain Like loose rock they pile up at the river Then break loose The first one Then the others Whole herds plunge through the water You can see the men gathered in the pass with their spears to watch Already they are waiting thousands…
I. As a child, Mary Callahan admired storybook orphans: Anne of Green Gables, Uncle Frank’s Mary, transported from mingey asylums to wide-hearted strangers from skimpy wincey dresses to puff-sleeved splendors from boiled turnips to chocolate sweeties. And noticing that all orphans had blue-black hair and eyes and skin white as lace, she pictured them…
At twelve, I read Karenina, up late, my eyes anonymous as wind on the print. I watched Anna turn in the looking-glass, offer her arm to the long crooked arm of candlelight, move down a corridor flickering the way silk will or the sleeve of a page. Outside, in the other world, it will not…
Returning through the back streets, through alleys so narrow The walls of the houses part like grass, Leaning backward, their patience demonstrated By scarred plaster, worm-eaten sills, and, Thrust through a chalk-blue door, A clenched brass fist, everything the same As it was, the sun, boys shooting marbles the same, The same flies buzzing minarets…
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