Poetry

after Vittorio Sereni Now, from the sweet fragrance of roses bitterness stings our nostrils. Our bay’s withdrawn from us, our beach littered with broken things—splintered oars, bits of old clay pipe from a long-ago shipwreck, fragments of china plates. Exciting, those days my townspeople scavenged rare cargo, furnishing their long winters with random wares. Now,…

No love like mine; no love; no love like mine transformed a hotel room into a womb and a womb into the child’s cry; love, no love, no love like mine. Read in the dark, one hand on cock Etruscan lore in my Etruscan book— justice had another flavor there, buried the son to punish…

is one of the greatest mysteries of nature. * Every day a pressure rises, brutalities brew; the pure in spirit are tried as they accommodate the mechanical demands of the physical, repetitive world. Repetition for Divinity is myth; repetition for mortals is labor. “Row, row, row your boat.” * The mock-Homeric and the beautiful Alexandrian…

Stories come to us like new senses a wave and an ash tree were sisters they had been separated since they were children but they went on believing in each other though each was sure that the other must be lost they cherished traits of themselves that they thought of as family resemblances features they…

Then out of the darkness leapt a bare hand that stroked my brow, “Come along, child; stretch out your feet under the blanket. Darkness will give you back, unremembering. Do not be afraid.” So I put down my book and pushed like a finger through sheer silk, the autobiographical part of me, the am, snatched…

There, in the same spot as the annihilation of the world, love of existence stood. We walked along. In boulevard windows: plates, hat-like napkins set for the imaginary meal. Each act of revenge has love as a twin but could art convey this without violence? In this parabola, I recalled the little dragon in the…

Shucking corn on the veranda, my sister said she didn’t care that her father had dropped by, or that I’d finally met him. Later, after the dark started to rake in, I found her outside again, staring at the sweep of fallow fields and shadows around our mother’s rented house, the curious row of weathered…

Placed on the earth for this little moment I wake today to entertain the world. But, Lord, before first light only the clouds my answerer, even to no question, I stare outside, at the black broken universe I cannot see: trees, clouds, birds, stones, fence, grass— all the accouterments of worship on my eyes and…

“Like one man milking a billy goat another holding a sieve beneath it,” Kant wrote, quoting an unnamed ancient. It takes a moment to notice the sieve doesn’t matter. In her nineties, a woman begins to sleepwalk. One morning finding pudding and a washed pot, another the opened drawers of her late husband’s dresser. After…