Poetry

One morning beginning to notice which thoughts pull the spirit out of the body, which return it. How quietly the abandoned body keens, like a bonsai maple surrounded by her dropped leaves. Rain or objects call the forgotten back: the droplets’ placid girth and weight; the dresser’s lack of     ambition. How strange it is…

Because her hair looked cool Because some of the best alien minds are watching     developments closely Because she is the traditional Daisy poised fragile before the     masculine mills Of production, yet wearing out six black pantsuits To bring us to acculturation and consequence Because the Nasdaq is plunging and there is a mandate…

I remember standing in the kitchen, stirring bones for soup, and in that moment, I became another person. It was an early spring evening, the air California mild. Outside, the eucalyptus was bowing compulsively over the neighbor’s motor home parked in the driveway. The street was quiet for once, and all the windows were open….

And who could play it well enough If deaf and dumb and blind with love? —Yeats Let’s not pretend we could be less complicated than millions before us. Let’s be just friends, be Platonic, only look at the bottoms of each other’s feet, or skin on inner forearms, where the sun has done almost no…

Nights turn a hairpin curve to dreams: I need to find our child a country or a name. I forget which. Jung remembered the smell of milk from his high chair, Woolf, red and purple flowers sprawled on her mother’s dress. A nun’s pink nose swoops towards me like a bird in my first recall….

1. That the wandering would be the more-favored part, this was unexpected, exceptional. Even the gnaw of the harness, faces shawled against the dust, nights without fire—sweet to him now— even this. Who could find that point again, at the canvas steppes where exhaustion forced them on into the serrated mouths of grass rather than…

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:…