Poetry

Venice, 1448 Installed in a high wooden pulpit, the professor Drones on aloud from his book, was it Stephen of Antioch’s spin on Abbas’ translation of Galen the Greek? The music of it all, anyway, the muscular rhythms, Phrase knit to phrase with the delicate Sinew of assonance—! The students in the foreground milling about,…

That’s what my mother called her dimestore pads of Irish Linen, each sheet with its trace of red gum threaded along the top, thumbed off for elegance. For special, she’d say, to be used for letters, not lists, to be used to write about the weather one day at a time. But she got only…

His plane was scarcely more than canvas stretched across board. Gunned down by a German Fokker onto no-man’s land, my father crawled under cross-fire to a crater and sprawled in on the dead. Only once did he mention the maggots and stench in a world that slammed up too soon. That night, between the sizzle…

She’s in the purple cone flowers, in the yarrow turning brown, nodding to lemon lilies. I hear her slighting a neighbor: “She’s flat as an ironing board.” Nana hands me an iron. “Get your head out of those books, they’ll fill you up with words.” She’s in my word pie, my alphabet soup. The day…

And the craft that createth a semblance —Morris, “Sigurd the Volsung” (1876) I think about a tiger. Twilight exalts The vast and never-resting library And seems to make the shelves of books recede; Powerful, innocent, new-made, stained with blood, He will move through his rainforest and morning, Will leave his spoor upon the muddy bank…

The all volunteer unarmored drop-out meth-head accepting army, be all you can be dead here and slow or swifter in the sand, poor black white chicanas need jobs, who doesn’t like bread with their shrapnel in the morning, I feel a draft coming, a daft numbing of sense, can you dig it, your fox hole…

Had he been able to sing… It was almost a song. The phrases enveloped in his voice’s flesh Were of the hardness of a writing near at hand. He would note: the kernel. The stone On which he constructs a temple of music. A school of gongs. How to hold the earth in place. Which…

Dearest, I am happy in the fire. The lighting is spectacular, snaking tongues, a rain of sparks, and the moans of the damned thrill me. There is no death here. God’s love revives us at the brink of extinction. The torments are cunningly varied but there is not one that does not correspond to a…

It must be just bad translating, like Robot Chicken and Fly Head; but thoughts of the three— Walnut tumors? Moo shu pus? Fire-bombed baby with broccoli?—make my hunger high- tail it like Iron Man in a thunderstorm. The Pair of Love Shrimp moan syphilitically. Seafood Commissioner takes bribes to okay rancid clams. The Sauteed Happy…