Would’ve said, did you see the calvesall copper and gold, cold leaning intotheir hulking mothers? Would’ve said, I grew up warm ina house with the wrong kind of bounty,sulking all over myself. Would’ve said room temperature affectionis the gelded way I try to keep youfrom disappointment. Trouble is I get myselfin trouble postcarding what should…
“We drank no milk for months, maybe a year,”my mother told me, “they poureda famine’s worth down the drains;all talk that summerwas of nuclear cloudsand acid rain.” Then came the crumbling of the Wall,and my father’s tears—my childish vision of himas the last communist,bathed in the blueglare of defeat, the revolution having been televisedand discardedas…
Maybe what a river loves mostabout the banks that hold it—that appear to hold it—is their willingness or resignation to being mere context for the river’s progressor retreat, depending. And maybe how the cattailsand reeds flourish there means they prefer a river-love—how the river, running always away the way rivers tend to, stands as proof that reliabilitydoesn’t…
It’s like a habit with you—your idea of tenderness—leading the blameless a littlemore blame-ward just soyou yourself can feel a bitless lonely: in what world is that tenderness? Andthough I disagreed with him,I made no argument,because really why were wetalking about any of this or,to be honest, even talking at all? But it was that…
Late autumn in the orange-bronze rangesAnd the sky still wet with slaughter, the voteDone, dying goldenrod tuning the meadowsBeige under flocks of birds that flex the airInto one black v after another,Carrying with them the occasionalSilence that flight coaxes from the chest, throat,And mind, coaxes from altitude’s blue viewTo me, though the bright air, no…
Book I Of a first disobedience, and the fruitOf that tree, whose mortal taste brought deathInto the world, and all our woe. Sing Muse,How heaven and earth rose out of chaos;Aid my adventurous song that intendsTo soar while it pursues things attemptedIn prose and rhyme. Instruct me from the firstPresent with wings outspread, dovelike, vast….
All night, the wildfires burnin Paradise. You’ve been in Texas for a week comforting your mother. Ashes swarm our porchlightin a warm wind. How long will you be gone? I ask. You say that you’re not sure: It’s hard. Her new apartment’s strewn with boxes— and she won’t eat. Outside the wind lashes against the eaves, but still…
Look, netted in shadows of dyingelms, we study our sandwiches like manuals,unscrew thermos warheads, doze, hat brims down, while one cups a jointas if it were a hatchling, offeringthe cinder, its smoke a rope flung to where I toil astride this troughof what I never want to set,drydocked boat of wet cement I’m sculling with…
And yet, off alone, we were happywith what stayed the same, and we stood therein the space between world and plaything,upon a spot which, from the beginninghad been established for pure event. —Rainer Maria Rilke, from “The Fourth Elegy” Translated by Edward Snow Beneath the highway, the stream was wide and shallow. Cars andtrucks hammered overhead, a…
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