You could see mountains and gardens in the name almost: Cuernavaca. But not our garden, hill-hidden, notched in a valley higher than the city. It was ours after a long dinner only when we discovered the ancient stability of three: triangle and tripod. I'd never seen so many waiters, perched in nooks and corners like…
I thought of the young, who came to me then. I taught them a scheme: I said Appetite, Temperament, Discipline — have the one, follow the other, submit to the third. It's yourself that you remake, I said Yeats said. But first you must have had things happen to you. For your own sake. Appetite,…
In the last days of his life, Schubert was frequently delirious, during which time he sang continuously. Fischer-Dieskau, Schubert's Songs The text caught in his blood. Conceived in one quick sure burst, it bloomed like a flower no one-understood. This music was too pure for the piano. Half-dazed friends hearing it ascend like a thin…
When my Aunt Lera — tiny now, slow moving and slow talking — wanted to tell me about her life, she began by saying, “Curtis and me had just one . . . year . . . together.” Curdiss (the way she says it) was a genial great man by all remembrances of him, and…
Calm, cross-legged on his narrow ledge of fifteenth-century Chinese bureaucracy, a scholar gazing at a flight of birds observes what he already knows. That those wings are quick as brushstrokes is self-evident. Or that the mist is swelling just like water dropped on rice paper. There is a moon, of course, fat and pale as…
Here, the storm-darkened house: Candles lit against the gloom. We're not afraid of the dark really; Just hitting furniture moving About. The old music stand Rears lyric arms against the sky. (A room needs some height) No one plays any more But we found a lovely folio Psalter — Portobello, I think. Cantate Domino, Canticum…
A painted cloth for the kitchen wall, Bought honeymoon time in the Quarter. He'd courted with tales of how it'd be; Ended with “N'Orlens no place for my wife.” Ship sank seven years to the week And he was gone. Cairo not a bad Place for a woman without a man. We, she and us,…
with knobby elbows is a trick. I'm in this Arkansas truck stop still writhing in pain from the jab she shoved into my funny bone. I have a brittle body, my skeleton impatient, a fast bullet lingering in the heart years after it's lodged. Waiting this long, I've nothing better to do than watch a…
Someday I hope to find the poem that tells me what is wrong with everybody, why the beautiful young girls in horror movies turn to hags whose skin drips from their faces, for instance, or why people drive down the street with looks of unbearable smugness, as if to say, “My kids are better than…
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