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     —the Queen of Persia Speaks 1. Could anything disturb the design Of this garden? The golden iris Threaded through the grass, The magnolias burning into blossom, Create an illusion of wilderness. Could anything disturb the design Of your hand placed over mine? You have memorized The gestures appropriate To this setting, the reflecting Pool, and…

This animal will not move a greater weight than it is used to—taken too far it does the same; stops, and so the merchants are obliged to lodge there. I     Shelley, Goya, Van der Weyden The Bug River ice scratched by Austrians with lead in their feet, and the hot fomentations of the Cuyahoga lit by…

1. If I had to guess, I’d say some other house, and some street less atterial. Nothing’s at my back and east seems arbitrary as coin. Dawn might come anywhere in this flat land bewildering as elms and horses, Twenty-nine years after his class and thirteen after his death I’m here to pick up the…

You sent the letter to an old address and now I receive it, three days after the news of your death. You’re already in the ground. I hold the letter to the window as if mere light could dissolve the paper seal. I think of miracles: how one evening I turned my wineglass and flashed…

Now that mills control the snarlers, the backbiter winds who can guess where the waters have gone? Only we know—they pestled this Yankee’s thoughts to a gold-nugget juggernaut reel, footwork ground down to decimals smaller than thought: his profit shoved up the high-water mark on our masthead. At 40 he balances his millstone on a…

A good day between constantly nervous, no major breakdown on the way to work, no self-concept of a man missing his life. A good day. Somewhere maybe someone paints his walls with a shotgun blast and blows out his unhappiness: so what? Be sure he does it also at this moment. Over and over. His…

We keep her in a box. We make up stories together about each thing she does. She is beautiful. She ages as we do. We keep her always older than ourselves so that she grows and marries in an age we only know from pictures. Her babies are born while we are at school. Her…

She put on the feather dress and flew about the garden flying low like a swallow he threw his cloak around her he was unacquainted with miracles contrary to his experience this suspension in air was something that she regularly accomplished the lines I left out had words like children in them, had the road…

If you sneeze into a towel you can thank the fluffed cotton for not being steel you can thank the cotton boll for not thinking how to grow but growing anyhow through hard flatpacked deep south dirt in one slow-motion explosion from seed not out but up up in a stiff upward thrust you can…