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  • The Champion Single Sculls

    Green leaves lit by the sun, the rest deep in shadow . . . a tree is an adequate symbol of inner or spiritual life. (“The natural object,” said E. P., “is always the adequate symbol.”) It wasn’t just characters . . . one heard that successful men, corporation executives, were into transcendental meditation. But…

  • Dublin Streets

    Always shining with rain, its aftermath or prescient with it — umbrella people natty in sun, but shelter always at the ready. Lovers are folded around each other under gazebos and pavilions in Stephen’s Green — in the lee of the wind behind statues — face on face, the only parts dry the parts of…

  • Johnno At Music Camp

    1 Across the street Kolkie’s doing his banjo, Mr. Antonelli on the flute. This is how I know it’s Sunday night again, August, and cold. I can just make out their gray old man hair and buttoned sweaters. Weather like this I could be older than the two of them. It’s nineteen years since those…

  • The Gardener

    She is on her knees pulling weeds. Her soul is desirous, it longs for cucumbers and melons if they will grow. When the earth was without form, and void, and darkness upon the face of the deep, the soul was born, a piece of the void broken off . . . the winged Psyche, Desire,…

  • Grey Paris

    The big gray box of Paris like an expensive giftpackage for an invalid stood round me tall as a queen’s effigy in blackened stone. Spring was being kept indoors; each salon a tiny court where winter flowers ruled; where fine lawn curtains kept the public out. Phrases from novels stood in shadows behind buildings —…

  • The Garden

    I’ve left my purse at your place again, my glasses a month ago, last week the necessary book. It isn’t getting any better, the boys, their father. His hands shake like orchids at the sound of my words. The children are terrified. Both have begun to call me Dad. It’s been years I’ve tried to…

  • Venus And The Lutte Player

    My nails, light, on these strings. On roadside wires, far off, shy kestrels Touch down. Clasped in their talons, All tidings hum like insects: the death Of someone dearly loved, the death of love, Aspirations of the young, the lies, the sighs Of businessmen and lovers. They ride Impulses, pounding, that go to drive iron…

  • The Depression Years

    Suddenly the photographs that Arthur Rothstein took become alive as movies and I watch the Model A leave behind its dust and pull on up to that storefront weather-worn with its tin porch roof held up by posts I might still carve initials on. In the barber shop that’s Dad’s he’s caught the hair that’s…