Mauve into purple, bent on foam-green stems, a bank of lavender washed by the rain recalls Languedoc, though this is on the plain of Caen, between two blocks of HLMs. Down south, the hedge around the one lycée is rosemary, high as a young girl's eyes. Here, notebooks bloat in puddles on the grass: school's…
A topaz stare, the art of self-seduction. . . She looks without resentment at the face The mirror offers her, applying blush To fill the contours with a candy red. His dancing tremors through the cabinet, Shaking her gaze with patience. “Do me next!” He tells her in a voice less rude than brash: She…
What the Earth Knows 1922, a summer noon when I was twelve, I stood above a pasture watching red ants crawl up from beneath the ground nearby, each one carrying a bead, a colored bead, so that the line of ants became a necklace moving past my feet. I knelt and dug then, knelt and…
Midsummer's Eve: rain slants into docked barges near the Jardin des Plantes Cut your losses. Soon the inhabitants will leave the city to the international monoglot young. Out of the smallest, oldest perched village branch well-marked paths, beside the stream, the ravine. The streams flow down into the local river. The footpaths widen into roads…
When I see the old man again down in the underworld this morning, he and his son— how well they get on together, grinning and talking easily among the bundled packages— I feel as if I've ripped open some ancient buried layer of my past; not my own, my blood's. It's 8:45. They've been there…
for Quincy Trouppe, Sr. father, it was an honor to be there, in the dugout with you, the glory of great black men swinging their lives as bats, at tiny white balls burning in at unbelievable speeds, riding up & in & out a curve breaking down wicked, like a ball falling off a table…
Thank you for these tiny particles of ocean salt, pearl-necklace viruses, winged protozoans: for the infinite, intricate shapes of sub-microscopic livin things. For algae spores and fungus spores, bonded by vital mutual genetic cooperation, spreading their inseparable lives from Equator to pole. My hand, my arm, make sweeping circles. Dust climbs the ladder of light….
The quarry master's house at the far end of town still tilts on the brink of ruin like a clamshell balanced on a rock as goggle-eyed motorcycle gangs gun their engines around the curve. . . . It is ten years since we lived there. We arrive at the dock this time at dusk and…
—we enter and it is our home —Mary Oppen one In a strange city, remote, British, yet barely hanging onto civilization. We are here at the edge. What is asked while closing the door, while turning the corner? Your child is asleep with her last question. By day, I can only manage poor explanations of…
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