Article

  • Urleid

    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…

  • Epistle for the Cicadas

    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…

  • A Stillness

    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…

  • From Our Mary To Me

    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…

  • Anna

    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…

  • Ways of Returning

    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…