That wine we drank all summer — a straw Moselle with a hint of hay- green to it, August and June melded, sweet as apples which do not cloy, and letting sleep come without terrors after a bottle — is unobtainable in this city. In the fall, industry takes over even the cartoon squirrels, and…
Whatever he needs, I don’t have it. Though I’m paid to bunch hay For the doe-eyed elephants and tenderize the whip That keeps the tiger on its high stool, He would rather have me Apprentice to his pain, hanging From the spiderlines of rope or buried under The great stakes driven deep in the ground….
The farm market, earlier all leaf lettuce and sugar peas, has gone to parsnip, potatoes, winter squash. And apples, dropping on the roadway, mixing with days of rain into thick slush as V. approaches the green market kiosk. FARM-FRESH EGGS PIE APPLES POTATOS The soft-spoken farmer follows where she points, bags beets, eggplant. He hands…
On cool, damp evenings at the end of July, you can walk into a mist; and the mist seems to disappear — from the dirt road; from the hill; from the trees. . . But in the full moon, you can begin to see it again — it gets closer, leaving a ring of clearness…
shaped like megaliths, also like tombstones, their sharp shoulders making the air emptier, clearer, and turning the day like a Monet sequence: gray- blue, shimmering, surfaceless, when between you and the morning light; almost haystacks on a mid- summer mid-afternoon, then rusting in earnest, grieving watchfires, into the dark. . . And the planes always…
It is spring, and flamingoes return to the Coggios' lawn, along with the virgin in her sky-blue robe. Inside the miniature picket fence, daisy pinwheels are spinning; a pair of young deer graze and listen. I listen too, imagining the voices of the Coggios calling to me from out behind the house where they take…
1 Getting out after reading, or writing, late — or was it waiting for a call? — past the windows where, on hot nights, they don’t pull all the shades all the way down. . . (I walk by slowly, twice.) Then up a darker, more private street. My footsteps echo. Echo? Someone else’s feet,…
Adorno writes of Stravinsky: "Stravinsky's imitators remained far behind their model, because they did not possess his power of renunciation, that perverse joy in self-denial. . . . To a very large degree taste coincides with the ability to refrain from tempting artistic means." Ralph Hamilton's paintings exhibit to an extraordinary degree the "power of…
Feeding the Birds Lured by unnatural feeding, by promises of plenty lavishly sprinkled and arced and scattered on cold weather, even the tufted titmouse has recently been known to loiter in the north here into winter. To feed or not to feed? The weather lady is careful, subtle, non-committal, anxious: “I’m sure more studies must…
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