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They kept him alive for years in warm water, The soldier who had lost his skin. At night He was visited by the wounded bat He had unfrozen after Passchendaele, Locking its heels under his forefinger And whispering into the mousy fur. Before letting the pipistrelle flicker Above his summery pool and tipple there,…
—at Dal Pescatore, Cannetto sull’Oglio, just outside Mantova It’s just as the waiter has brought us a single buttery dumpling stuffed with pecorino, parmigiano, and ricotta that arrives after the porcini mushrooms and the seafood risotto and before the snapper with tomato and black olives and the duck in balsamic…
The great sports hero can remember When he thought sex was just for fun. Now he’s desperately affixed to woman number 53,671.
Brush of sunlight on the dry grass. These shadows blowing black up the mountain, and elsewhere there is laughing, you are moderate, see, I am there. A noise from inside the neighbor’s window. In the dark drifts you gather— let drop the poor idea— kisses him swiftly and leaves. That we may be increased. Thrum…
I I couldn’t make out the minuscule handwriting In the notebook the size of his palm and crinkled Like an origami quim by shell-blast that stopped His pocket watch at death. I couldn’t read the poem. II From where he lay he could hear the skylark’s Skyward exultation, a chaffinch to his left Fidgeting among…
Thrift built us a shed out back in which to stow our set. I see a sky. A cloud with a carpenter’s hand in it. I know that shed. An all-day affair with particle board and steel hinges. All of us standing at attention, feeling— my family and I— (and I was youngest, and…
“. . . most desires end up in stinking ponds . . .” —Auden The water, if you can call it that, is black as tar, and the lily pads are seared at the edges, curling up as if trying not to touch it more than they have to. The lilies themselves have gone to…
Consider history as a cloud or the spread of roots Where nothing is consecutive Except at the moment of singularity, as in when one Walks into the day’s weather, The wind tearing the loose branches, power Lines dipping, and perhaps this is all we could Consider with any validity, for to go beyond this Is…
As in an illuminated page, whose busy edges have taken over. As in: jasmine starred onto the vine-dense walls, stands of phlox, and oranges, the flesh of each chilled turgid. By herself the sleepwalking girl arranged them: the paper airplanes now wrecked on the vines, sodden, crumpled into blooms which are mistaken all morning for…
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