Poetry

The weather is changing. The mountainous temperate      climate edges toward autumn. There's a crowded sound in the rattling leaves of the figtree and I think of cities, though the second fruit, ovarian, purple, splitting to scarlet is ready for picking. The brambles hedging pink villas banked up from the      roadway burgeon with berries ripening black,…

89. We will die in transparent Petropolis, Where Proserpina rules us. We swallow lethal air with every breath, And for us each hour is the hour of death. Menacing Athena, sea-goddess, Lay aside your strong stone helm. We will die in transparent Petropolis, Not yours, but Proserpina's realm. 1916 (translated by Robert Tracy)

I'm here because I needed work, two acres worth, because I hate punching in and following orders, because damp earth slows me in the morning when spiders drop like parachutes if I move the leaves anchoring their webs, because the interwoven blades—crossed swords at a military wedding—drench me in the rising heat, because I drift…

In the hospital garden we met an old gentleman from Savannah who said he'd seen misery in the world. The name “Appalachia” was uttered; a lovely word for an unlovely place, he said. I studied the trim of the garden's grass borders, such straight lines, the grass seemed to be all sewn into a single…

We look at a forest and we say: There is timber for ships here, timber for masts, The redness of pine trees Freed from their shaggy load all the way to the top, So they can creak through a storm Like stone-pines standing alone In the treeless infuriate air; Thrust into the dancing deck they…

after Chekhov, via Harold Clurman There once was a man who desired happiness. At odd times of the year he would feel a momentary surge of happiness but he wanted that feeling all the time. He consulted a doctor of happiness who deduced that the man craved love and recommended that he find a woman….

—Hiroshige The mountain is dyeing a long blue cloth that ripples over the rocks, cascading, a bolt of indigo the woodsman follows on his way to gather firewood. The trees reach up on bird toes to the empty sky, their gray breasts furrowed in the plunging light. A few pebbles loosen, the green hills shift…

53 And I dreamed Lao Tzu was saying, There is advantage in using what can be seen, and exists. And advantage also goes with using what cannot ever be seen, and isn't. And of a person's life the same is so. Ah so, I said, so. Some nothing is really something after all, a game…

Because I know a mistake can be fatal, I pick only what identifies without question, puffball, meadow mushroom, hen-of-the-woods. And though there are some delicacies I'll miss, Amanita rubescens, a pale red fruit which may or may not contain the toxin Amanita for which it is named, I prefer to proceed this way, cautiously, holding…