Poetry

The passengers riding the train do not know. Nor do the taxi drivers lining up miles away. But they trust they will meet each other. The yellow cabs inch forward like the hours of a life. Each time a door opens, someone enters.

Haydn conducting the first performance of the Farewell Symphony for Count Esterhazy in his palace, the work composed so that here and there an instrument would cease, each bewigged and bespectacled musician pack up his case and depart, the rich sounds in that great hall, with its plaster curlicues and cherubs and six-foot candelabra, diminishing…

You came to me first as dawn hauled up on ropes of apricot above the blackened wall of white pine. You came from the south, from the highest places, came down from the mountain running. You were announced by the crows, the shrill calls of alarm from the uppermost branches. You opened your throats in…

“I’ve decided the only thing that really interests me is how the sun hits a white wall.” —Edward Hopper to Andrew Wyeth   Somehow the crow snuck in, its caws echo             in the fluorescence of the hallways. We are all waiting at the ICU ward             for your suffering to come to an end….

Miguel told me he had been home alone for two hours, studying. It was in Guanajuato when he was twelve years old, on the Day of the Dead, and his mother and sisters had gone to tidy his father and grandparents’ graves. He didn’t remember why he looked from his book on the dining room…

is right, the pear is always askew at the brink, always in danger of falling straight out of the world of sphere toward the floor we don’t often see, that might be painted a rosy brown or gray green and still tilt into the landscape that needs brushstrokes to complete it, to fill in—but he…

When he sang of what had passed, the trees would lean toward him, he could suspend the suffering of the damned, he could bring back the dead.   Don’t look back! . . . Hell is a spotless room overlooking the ocean; she wants out. “I’m heading for nowhere, what do I have to look…

When I turned twelve and feared I’d go to hell, I used to write lists of my mortal sins on paper scraps I tucked into my wallet. Each time I broke one of the big commandments— not little ones, such as to honor parents which even Jesus, like me the son of peasants, had never…

translated from the Italian by Jonathan Galassi   Oh how there in the glittering stretch that bends toward the hills the hum of evening lessens and the trees chat with the hackneyed murmur of the sand; and how this common life no more our own than our breath gets channeled there, crystalline, into orders of…