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blue wing I found you a monarch flown from his route along the meridian into my tarred driveway where is your mate who was always with you and is not used to solitary travel I took you for an heir of blueness a passenger of seasons I took you for orchid the pupa wakes to…
In her studio an artist begins to paint a portrait of Saint Francis in his beast-colored robe. He is bending slightly forward preaching to the birds. With short vertical strokes she paints the birds white, the mountains blue. She outlines the features of his face, thin lips, high cheekbones, a golden halo. She paints the…
Before supper, my father's wife shouts my brother out. He has come too close, touched her like a son, she said, like a son. I don't want any more sons. And my father, ignoring this too, glad he is on the Florida coast now, goes out into late fall's twilight to pick his grapefruit, ripe…
So what if your name is “Burning Bush”— hair like fire, that bright, that red. And fingers delicate as birthday candles. So what if you look a little eerie, so pale and thin astride that bony nag. Still you are the luminous madonna — both lodestar and throat-lump in one. Without you, my voice…
Everyone wore evening clothes, Got in and out of supercharged saloons The size of drawing rooms, And lived in a nightclub To the tune of watery. Latin rhythms I could pick up on my crystal set. Radio antennas also emitted Cute little bolts of lightning That flew through the air bearing The message: Balloonists Found,…
A mile into the sky our plane is practically nothing. This turbulence of air—also nothing, like the loose cells that float within the eye. Connecticut rolls and pitches below— Einstein was right, mistrusting his own feet, and so was Bishop Berkeley, for a plane glinting unseen among leaden clouds, droning toward the Atlantic unheard, is…
1. Pastorale ”Lie down and stay down,” she shouts, once again underestimating the impact of her anatomy on mine. Her mistake's to place me too high on the ladder of being — she thinks I'm a bad dog and therefore corrigible. But the forces that rule me are beneath control — I'm only a tool…
for Tom Lux I hadn't known Miss Halloran, had never been one of her students, but the School Board must have decided attending her funeral would be educational for all of us. Turning around in the itchy, cushioned pew of Saint Mary's, I could see only kids. It was 1951. We collected bubblegum cards about…
Where better to worship music than church — sanctuary amid sanctuary? Above us, some incense of desire swirls mindful and apart. Call it a lost bat, circling this quartet as counterpoint, as jazz dissolving their surging measure. At first no one sees the looping presence in the dusky rafters where, other nights, all eyes might…
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