Poetry

                                     loquitur:                 Anton Raphael Mengs                                               Court-Painter elect to                                               Charles III of Spain Signori, you have my gratitude for the signal honor of this banquet, the learned discourses,                    as well as, of course, the great distinction of your company. “Old Mengs,” you call me among yourselves, and it is true: I am                   …

Not wilderness exactly open country a wooded valley and the river in it waterfall and towpath footbridge     lockhouse a canal that runs to Cumberland beside the Potomac     not wilderness     you know that bounded parkland with your neighborhood above it stage set by some Luminist where you describe the hour     convinced no calendar can register a…

Arias, not only of voice, but as when tan grasses blow and bend yellow and pink then darken then yellow, or someone’s betrayal fills another with darkness—so I have felt my fill. At the opera this week Pagliacci— heartbreaking, sexy—lover, husband, wife, another lover scorned. The week before the town gossip: a friend having left…

                                                                        lynch not as in pin, the kind that keeps the wheels turning, and not the strip of land that marks the border between two fields. unrelated to link, as in chain, or by extension whatever connects one part to another, and therefore not a measure of chain, which in any case is…

You showed up late and angry. You shat upon the floor. With that, how could we fail to recognize you? Your father, grief’s tent show wizard, the long connected silks pouring from his sleeve. And your mother? Haven’t you known me wholly as the spider knows each tilting and imperfect room she sews to be…

I could think the novella. I could compose over time “their code, their shorthand bells.” There’s a cart and there’s a peach: two things but no ambiguity. Little Kaspar lies in the dark alone on a list with his wooden horse. Little Fred, barely able to contain his eagerness to record his experiences, rushes to…

You, of all the masters, have been the secret sharer Of what’s most important,                                             exclusion, Until the form is given us out of what has been given, And never imposed upon, Scrape and erase, scrape and erase                                                          until the object comes clear. I well remember the time I didn’t visit you In Bologna,…

White ash, starling, lung of river rising and filling with silt: winter has gone, took its flood and its filth. This is the one season your house stands on dry feet. Today, I am half as tall as your house, my eye watching through the eye of the cobweb as wind makes its thrifty shuffle…

I have dreamed of you so much you are the headless hawk I found in a field, upturned like a plow blade of feathers. “Pick me up,” you said, “so I might roost as if I were the hawk.” I have dreamed of you so much, a tree grew where I stood, and grass rose…