Poetry

           Coppélia What does it mean? What can it mean? A man so lonely he goes mad and builds a girl furnished with everything, and yes, I mean everything. Just look: right down to the curl of our disputed provinces, she’s my twin, Alsace to my Lorraine, no blood but oil for beaus who blanch, or…

Crack in the silence, blades of green a warbler leaps through. The same room, roses on the wallpaper, a deep old tub. And I’ve opened the blinds. Stripes of light corrugate the bedclothes.

What I also didn’t expect was the premonition. Through the windshield, I half-saw two angels, two somber old gentlemen telling me my life was due. But when I thought to them I still have a five-year-old son to raise, and asked to be given the time to raise him, they both stepped back from me…

Through blue glass, a table painted blue, roses vermilion, Amber tumblers, candlesticks, a mirror darkening until all Grays in oncoming light. Goats bleat, radioblare, a gunshot. Past the celosia, a tree where yellow birds feed; heat and wind From the mountains. Close your eyes and retinas scald The window crimson, mullions bright of orangeskin Lit…

The Spanish Steps: Keats Departing He hated that he could no longer taste the thick risotto, the paved rosetta rolls soft on the inside, cool globes of fruit plucked from ashy soil, the quivering curd cheese and leafy Puglian greens. All sustenance—even his Chianti’s terroir— mocked him. And so, after weeks of this effrontery, he…

The old cat turns by curving what’s left of his body beyond the careless trees. Does it ache, each twinge and cramp, to wander in hunger, ever fruitless at eye level? Across the lawn the sunlight has nearly given up dragging out its whites like a chapel veil, faking away its sullied past, having come…

Behind the bench the Drive, before the bench the River. Behind the bench, white lights approaching east and west become red lights receding west and east while before the bench, there are paved and unpaved pathways and a grassy field, the boathouse, and the playground, and the gardens of a park named for a man…

They’d take her child away, unless he shed more weight. But every time he cried, she fed. More weight. My little niece too light, and snow not dense enough, I squeezed myself behind her on the sled: more weight. So thin her body cannot warm itself, she picks at the meager salad on her plate….

Samurai sword-fighting lesson, Tokyo We’re using the iaito or “practice sword” now               as opposed to the shinken or “live sword” which looks as though it can cut through lampposts                             and is “hungry for the flesh of its owner,” says smiling Sakaguchi-san through a translator,               which is why I’m getting lots of unintentional laughs when I…