Poetry

How long can one man’s lifetime last? —Wang Wei Long enough, he said to our tears, to know all of it is a gift. We wanted to hold him back from the dying he was busy doing, nine months of working his way through the Book of Subtractions: first the relished taste of food and…

For dermatology, for the betterment Of medical science, Joseph Towne produced Over five hundred models of skin disease, Forming those faces from beeswax and resin, Applying disease with spatulas and knives— Lesions and rashes, pustules, and the chancres Of unchecked syphilis, especially those On faces disfigured by heredity, Bad luck, or unwisely satiated lust, An…

Below this knoll a man kneels. Face close to the earth, he works soil like a potter works clay, kneading and shaping until hands slowly open, reveal a single green stalk before he palms himself up the row as if he hauls on his back morning’s sun-sprawl, a bringer of light he cannot bring here…

The chilly blood stands still around my heart. —Virgil Self-banished to the Chalcis desert for three years, Hieronymus delved deeply into his sacred texts, sleeping little and eating less, lingering for hours in the hush of dawn to recite a litany of vows, to compose copious epistles to church elders, and to purify his sunburned…

       1. Once more. My obligation to my mind requires that I speak in the only way it understands.—This time, of the oldest tree remembered, the garden oak in its mysterious well which utters still, each spring—after winter and all its snows—new branches, and on them leaves. Then flowers—and, then its proper seeds, each acorn in…

They know how to stay in one place. Each year a circle: no need for photos or taxes. They are dressed for the weather, never stuck inside on a lively day. Tongues of green light: their voices made of wind. To climb one is to leave the peopled world behind. They cast such shadows: big…

Automobiles rout the Eternal City, their exhaust peeling like slow acid the skin and cartilage off statues, slipping the spirit from its moorings, as a million times a day, humans stand, backs pressed to the wall in the narrow streets, to let cars pass. One step, two, sometimes maybe even a string of uninterrupted steps,…

“I think you think I don’t know who you are,” she says at the window, “but I know what I know.” She sits across her tiny, white, bizarre, and sterile room, watching the falling snow. He stares at the half-done puzzle on the floor: Escher’s Waterfall, just more confusions for someone seldom coherent anymore, being…

In the same week that John F. Kennedy, Jr., with wife Caroline and her sister Lauren, crashed his private plane into the sea, a Kentuckian who worked for Tyson Foods— which gave big money to President Bill Clinton, who led the mourning for JFK, Jr.—fell into, not a vat, vat sounds undignified, like in that…