Made by what I read Slippage To think a fall broken as not a stumble but a certain voice among the trees Listen Listen I am the ghost of undivided attention I am what Saul saw on the road near Damascus I am the ancient sigh pushed out on the…
Because the bullet was a dream before it was a bird. Because the bullet was a dream before it alighted in the child’s body while he looked at a pigeon wobbling through the air. Because the child has moved into photographs on mantels and the dreamer’s hands are folded in his lap and have not…
Virginia, after a WPA photo Leafless tree shadow scribbles its face and shadows of deflated bushes flood the yard, an arrogant silver squalor so riddled and clumped it seems a crowd had barged about, then despaired of raising a response from such a blank and pointless house. Bare weatherboard of equivocal color, snaggle-toothed shutters. The…
When William Blake came fashionably late to parties he’d blame it on archangels, prophecies broadcast between the leaves of ordinary trees in the orchard: those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained… As in Martinsville, Wisconsin, when we allowed Mike Meinholz to get in the car, surely a mistake,…
In Surprise, every day is a party, streamers in the trees and piñatas bursting. No one from Surprise visits Dismal, though they’ve heard of its fog- shrouded hills and barren streams. In Dismal they dream of Happy and What Cheer, but it’s all they can do to someday make it to Boring, where homes are…
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…
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