His mother strokes a stack of black hankies like a dead lap dog as I am introduced. She doesn’t rise to the occasion. Disappointed! I am too gaudy, too tall on my new platform shoes, though I gush on cue over the dried wild- flowers, pillows creweled with mush- rooms, the caged lovebirds. “You’re only…
In my father’s red sweater I wake to snow in the South. His first vacation alone, he’s sleeping on my sofa, says again we never had a yellow Olds. But I remember him in his only suit, leaving for his doctors in St. Paul, 1956, pushing snow from the wheels of the yellow car: the…
I never loved summer enough, Racing from the platform to the sea, The sea impossible to forget, Always there, holding and withholding, Tempestuous and merely quarrelsome. I think of the infinity waiting Beyond the dunes, calm days When I dove into reflection and was released. I made friends that time of year. Work was over,…
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…
Jelka’s profile decorates the doorway to my secret architecture. Jelka’s profile chaffs at its own imposture, and the indirection of its stardust infiltrates my polar brain: Welcome to the material world where omens of the after-world are leaked, flowing like a black shirt. Mountains migrate into my head: I was there to witness the vulgar…
In the dawn freshness, when the mists are slowly rising from the great lawns and only a few early delivery trucks move silently down the lanes, when the house is quiet but for sounds of deep breathing behind closed doors and the subdued creak of your footsteps on the stairs, to walk out barefoot on…
(from Jacob van Ruisdael and for John Updike) My topsoil coverlet, dampened by a coast that’s warmed by mediation of the sea, shall be transformed (I’ll paint them) into hills, crags bearing castles, churches, theology for which a million suffering soldiers died. A birch tree (blasted) leans along one border to balance the other (a…
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