The thick humidity means nothing, my nostalgia even less. The dip and throaty call of goldfinch and oriole, fallen blooms strewn on the ground commemorate the ease of mere detail. But that strong and lingering scent distracts me from the tree-lined road to a saddled mare and her foal taking boys through their paces in…
The road is a hard road, and the river is wadded and flattened out Due west of Santa Maria dell'Ortolo. Each morning I drove with its steady breathing right to my right, Dawn like a courtier With his high white hat just coming into the room, Ponte Pietra cut in the morning gauze, …
They play ferociously to beat the rain, my youngest neighbors shrieking in the yard. “Can you do this?” And Randolph dives into the dirt. His friend goes wild. “Can you do this? Can you do this?” she sings, dragging her bony knees along the dust. Some wise child’s chalked in green on the Giant wall,…
I’d seen it only once, the scar I told my childhood friends my father got at war. A jagged scrawl, like a hurt remark, a lost island on his thigh. He never told me if a woman’s kiss left its imprint there, or if it caused him pain when strangers stopped to stare. But when…
with André Frénaud I Pull out the pissed-on clinkers, Rake down the ashes of my bed, and come in And let's do it, as cold as we can get, Calving into the void like glaciers Into the green Northern sea. Give…
Good Professor, I’m glad you weren’t my father! The little gods and demons fall in across your desk like infantry — Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan toys, spanning two millennia. Some wear hats with horns, others horned helmets. Athletic satyrs and jackal-headed women stand uniformly muscular. The old in robes, larger, watch us, smiling, satisfied they’ve outlived…
She’s mending the hem of a favorite dress her bare back pressed against a stove that’s cold for the first time in months — in flannel she felt ugly. But now it’s April the snow broken up by trumpeting jonquils — yellow and green they call her out to the porch buckled by winter’s weight….
(suggested by parts of Petrarch's Sonnet 98) In Heaven speakers touch voices on voices And God shines on the nearness of each voice (No need for asking or hesitation) with such love As guides the small light of stars at their exact and remote distances. Even so are pure and simple acts, offered in kindness,…
I killed a fly and laid my weapon next to it as one lays the weapon of a dead hero beside his body — the fly that tries to mount the window to its top; that was born out of a swamp to die in a bold effort beyond itself, and I am he that…
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