Poetry

Annoyed with the parochialism of the “fantastic city” of St. Petersburg and close to the unexpected end of his life, Gogol escaped to Rome. He settled in a colony of Russian artists, shared lodgings with his bosom friend, the painter Alexander Ge. On their long walks they discovered “the inner meaning of everything.” Gogol, a…

Two Italians painted on both sides of the grand marble staircase in the Scuola di San Rocco—The Plague. The great equalizer. In this democracy of the dead, a woman and her baby are flung over a pallet on wheels, a man with sinews and massive calves pushes them, and it could be almost tender how…

In the apartment next door, a boy plays the piano, Chopin, mostly, though sometimes notes he’s made up. Through the woman’s window climbs the noise of 14th Street: merciless horns, squealing bus brakes, carnival-like music from an ice cream truck belting “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain” over and over and over. The phone rings:…

Why let it matter so much?: the morning’s morningness, early dark modulating into light and the tall thin spruces jabbing their black outlines at dawn, light touching the slope’s outcroppings of rock and yellow grass, as I sit curled under blankets in the world after the world Descartes shattered, a monstrous fracture like the creek’s…

1. You’d brought a hand-carved toy, a wooden ring Tied by a thong of leather to a stick And demonstrated with a stab, one quick Thrust through its circle. Shaken by the thing, My gaze slid from your freshman composition Down to your sandals and enameled toes. Come on, you said, let’s cut out—what’s to…

    Black drape like a solid shadow, as if the shade won’t slide from her. Veil,     abstracted hair lifting on the breeze. Around us heels, furs, and scarves like swatches     of Las Vegas, a twitch of liner on a pair of eyes, men in the cut of coats,     the usual, long-faced inspection…

The phones, the long-distance phones are ringing. The satellite phone from the field camp in Kosovo. The lawyer’s phone in a complex in Palo Alto. The car phone conveying a child to baseball practice. In this way the siblings converse and condole much as the now-vanished Carolina parakeets with their sunflower-yellow heads and radiant green…

Cosmologists, epic poets, holy men in exile— They all found their way to the illustrious library. All lovers of knowledge were welcome to a niche In that bristling hush, no matter how shaggy or ragged. There were the usual cynics and the inevitable stoics. Some were sages without honor, scrawling out summas In their mongrel…

Little Kaiser, the parrot in our local headshop’s sidewalk cage, confronts an unceasing daily stream of whistles and coos and hellos, waspish buzz of film on auto-wind, the sudden, minor lightning of a flash. He doesn’t seem to mind. Not a headshop exactly: years ago the police swept away the ranks of bongs and rolling…