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…

She’d grown tired, she admitted, of the picturesque— pretty pipers piped against a backdrape of pineapple yellow. She closed her eyes to it and it went away. In this sight heaven she trilled her right hand in the water-lilied water and wondered at the weather. Twenty starlings twittered. The day had been dieted down to…

We are not surprised, those of us who are made, we’ve been told, in God’s image, that our God, who has not tissue nor tail, is a jealous God. What makes us snappish, after all, about God is impeccability but if jealousy makes us also Godlike—and if that’s where our love turned wrong— then there…

Bare trees in front of brown buildings. A pale dry wreath. The bright red ribbon hanging and broken stands for all this century’s cruelty. The street is quiet. Mammoth fog spreads along the ground. The ribbon should be enormous, the road should be made of ribbon, the trees swathed, the babies swaddled. Men should open…

From a spoon to a city —Ernesto N. Rogers, designer, 1900–1969 In the useless pages of Domus, the trade journal of utilitarian interiors, no one’s friend sits on foam, having postconsumption microevents in series, in unsudden red contexts, in the crook of luxury. The dial was big and lobotomy-white wardrobe doors, blaring like mimes in…