Poetry

The Seraphim, whose eyes are jewels, read the Inferno of Dante Alighieri anagogically, without weeping. Justice is a simple thing for them, fluttering in their empty robes. But I once wandered through the Wood of Suicides with a girl who thought Pietro delle Vigne had a perfect right to his own flesh even when he…

I sit by the window of a cafe and watch the thin city rain bounce off the tops of cars and paste the hair of passers-by to their cheeks. Near me, two women talk across the one-legged disk of the table, the grain of shared thinking in their faces. A year ago, we talked like…

(“You can even make something not a poem become a poem . . . by a certain squint or a certain way of leaning our ears we find them.” W.S.) If I could only squint like Bill Stafford then I would be in that country where men and women speak poetry, unsurprised, as trees speak…

So many times I answer the phone trembling Because of the losses of the past, Concoct a disaster, Never correctly. My young aunt has a tumor, Cancer in the liver and lungs. Didn’t she serve mostaccioli and meatballs A few weeks ago? She said she was tired. At her wedding I was the flower girl….

She writes that she senses my loneliness and wonders if it’s good or if it maims and I wonder also. But can she sense how it is at the end of the day, after working well and leaving my dinner to cook, when I lie down and feel the darkness seep through the house? Does…

His knock was worth answering slowly, Teasingly, “Who’s there?”, letting my features, My fragrance break on him in the doorway Like the memory of a phantasy. He was surprised to hear his nickname On my lips; yes, he would “step in for a bit.” Daisies and good silver set my table, Dazzling him, keeping his…

Though she coaxes the embroidered silk over her head with the care of someone attending a ball, the slip is transparent, and in the moonlight filtering through the bedroom window, her body is even more real for its inspired accidents: her breasts brazen and shy both at once, mangos and the ordinary flesh. It is…

for Lloyd The day is so heavy movement is nearly impossible; our clothes stick to our thighs, to the granite bench—a sweatiness without athletics or the fever of intimacies. Across from us, Miles Standish, Evangeline, and Hiawatha gaze blankly in bas relief. There are others, too, characters I’m too dazed to name. The pedestal which…

The curved fragment lies among shards and wild crocus, an artifact unearthed near the stopped road. Bulldozers are idling in the sun. Identify, says the Chief. We have come across fields marked with flags to the place where archeologists do their slow dance on rubble, up the sliced hill, coins of Antiochus IV warming their…