Poetry

I saw the wind tilt the corn: Will and Humility, just an image. The sugarcane cut at the same height, the field freshly burned smelling of flan, the bittersweet roots in my house.

In Memoriam: Columbia Military Academy 1905-1978 The itch of blue sky covers me like wool. If I look quickly I'll see the thin shadows running from themselves, the battalions of light blowing away with the years. The bugle boy with one eye winks as if to say, “Forgive.”            The flag unfurls atop the brass…

After Marvell's Latin Though alien to the pleasures of women, unfit to plunge your sickle into the virgin crop and sin in the usual fashion, don't think yourself unmanly! Recognition shall be eternally pregnant by you, you'll ruin nine sisters (having lured them from their mountain), and Echo also — knocked up often — will…

Take up your cross and don't cross me. I just xeroxed my hand, veins, bones and all. See, it's blue now, my doctor says, because the sky, by mistake, mirage or otherwise, he says, is the color, arteries, of the sun's eyes. Take up your cross and follow (why me?) to the Flannery Theater. Redshift…

“Elizabeth passed the chief of the night in her sister's room.” He rode a dark horse through the land of nightmares, his hair pulled back so tight his eye's couldn't close. Elizabeth feared for her sister Jane who was kind to strangers. The land of sisters neighbors the land of English country houses. A letter…

for R. F. One whose son has died has to forgive the boys who still live, when they come up the street slowly in a ragged group, talking, three with mitts, one with the ball. Should forgive, and does. And a man whose marriage has broken under his hard pressures or hers has to blink…

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,…