Poetry

how was it sudden your long death shock fixed black parking lots ramps the bright art in the hallways flagrant flowers a fish tank in the white places one latex glove like petals spilled on the way to or from some room with a horror in it glass coffin rice flour your skin taking on…

All the way home, I kept thinking of the lost finger of St. Teresa, displayed in the gift shop of a convent where she spent most of her life being thrown by the devil down the stairs or gripping the handrail after communion, so others wouldn’t see how it took all of her strength to…

Well, another year has passed! And, while it hasn’t been a perfect one, we have survived. Oh, first there was the house burning down—everything ruined: furniture, original artworks, priceless family heirlooms lost because of some sort of electrical short according to the arson squad who, incidentally, interrogated us for 3 months, making damaging allegations to…

Down on all fours. The breaking of rules the only rule. Cut off from clear lines of retreat. Beguiled by excess. By like-minded folk enthroned in ever tinier courts.

Johnson, Vermont Yet another metamorphic swimming hole, waterfall where language fails. Gneiss, schist, slate. You can hear nouns meta- morphose to verbs, gnarl, shiver, split, then strip down, tumble in granitic kettle-holes and camouflage themselves in green water, green because pines hang above the fault-line and shade language from blue-blank sky where some- body’s watching,…

January, moth month,                                       crisp frost-flank and fluttering, Verona, Piazza Bra in the cut-light,                                               late afternoon, midwinter, 1959, Roman arena in close-up tonsured and monk robed After the snowfall. Behind my back, down via Mazzini, the bookstore And long wooden table in whose drawer Harold will show me, in a month or so,                                                                   …

in memory of Penny Cabot Decades ago you showed me marsh marigolds At Carrigskeewaun and behind a dry-stone wall The water-lily lake’s harvest of helleborines. As you lie dying there can be only one lapwing Immortalizing at Dooaghtry your minty Footsteps around the last of the yellow flags.

Eyes the color of winter water, eyes the winter of water where I Quoits in the Spartan month Hyacinthius, the game joins us, pronounces us god and boy: I toss him the discus thinking This is mine and the wind says Not yet Memory with small hairs pasted to pale wet skin (the flower hyacinthos,…

After all these analyses, the fact remains intact.