Madam, this is a prayer-ring from Tibet: a tiny bell to rouse the god, three silver thunderbolts, seven grains of gold. And in the center, see, an emerald, lightless, dark. . . I had it from a lama's chela whose master sent him to buy food. Here there are many beggars from the hills. You…
From the green woods, from the flashing wilderness, she selected one perfect tree. There she cut her heart, paring down to the sap-center, slippery where the bark peeled back in three inner layers. She cut first through the outer bark, its rough edges and satisfactory hurts. She peeled through the cambium, cutting the upward life…
Ladies are outside the door; I hear them rustling, dropping keys inside their purses, snapping them shut. Mother nudges to the door. Peering through the keyhole she whistles in two tones: Hello! Hello! and lets the ladies inside. Nodding, they enter shaking their coats. Their hands strike: pale cobras hitting my cheeks making a series…
The cloud is a bowler hat, a profile delicate and handsome, a cane, a figure falling, the plume of smoke from a train. My grandfather sits up straight, his dark eyebrows rakish and innocent. The hooded photographer shoots his plates back and forth. The cloud becomes a pigeon's wing. Caught in four o'clock November sadness,…
Overhead, a mile up from where we share our sandwiches and soft drinks, five slow hawks lazily gyre on the blank blue page of haze, loving their air and elevation. They see the two of us, maybe, as the slow mobile dots that they are, our motions among April's tattered hedges as otherworldy and deliberate…
My future is a memory of an old woman walking through winter streets, her thick black coat too heavy, the bundles she carries in each hand too heavy — never mind, I'll get her back to the house on the edge of the rail road flats, the tracks criss-crossing to the loading docks of the…
The grain elevators have stood empty for years. They used to feed an entire nation of children. Hunched in red leatherette breakfast nooks, fingers dreaming, children let their spoons clack on the white sides of their bowls. They stare at the carton on the table, a miniature silo with a kindly face smiling under a…
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)
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