Poetry

(Ormos Athinios, Thira) Morning comes, and the baked look of rising early on people’s faces; or evening, and the cool with a trace of rot in it lifts off the face of the waves. And in the concrete cafe, the simple blank shoulders of fascination, changed in no year; with emptiness in their mouths —…

My handwriting’s big, like grazing cattle, I’m learning cursive on the dock The summer that polio twists my mother’s legs. I write as she reads me the fable Of the prince who was sleepless for 100 years. There’s always a broken heart And I know sleepless nights are already a spell. White gauze, the curtains…

I. Not to speak when we’re so close is to be small and shapeless, unlike the other, small and not part of the clouds, the islands of sky, the inhaled breath. To forget women while gazing at their form. As when the navies are formless, ships without number, planted in the ocean as on plateaus…

He woke in a different country, his own hands Rose to his mouth, and his fingers Rubbed at his eyes, and he was standing On his own feet, but the people passing Had darkened their speech like daylight going dim Around him, he told them to speak slowly, he told them To listen, please, he…

—Prayer, George Herbert The sun’s going down. Which is nothing new.      And there’s nothing special about the end of this day,      Even if a lot of the things we thought we knew Start disappearing with the light. What can you say? It’s a strange feeling, kind of a relief,      To sit in the dark and…

In his yellow swimsuit, in the heat of July, they sent him to his room, the suggestion of his father’s hand. It was the shape of a passing cloud — the burnished palm left a taste in his mouth: charcoal. A moment not worth remembering. But the hotel and its ammonia smell, palm trees bristling,…

This heat, like a blow, numbs us. Together at the side of the lake, alone, no one for miles. Far away, the occasional boat trawls the other shore. The lake is vast as an ocean, as capricious, too, calm and clear, then raging in storms, hurling tree trunks against our fragile dock. By day, mourning…

Whose heart hasn’t been broken? Or set free. Maybe that’s it. Worked in a way it was never intended, and then working that way forever. At the moment of failure — when the senses falter — there’s a sound inside the chest as if something was turning over and over. But maybe it isn’t broken….

What news from here? Just the certain diminishment of fathers, alive or newly dead they’ll always move us one year farther from them. You’ve told me much of yours—the one to whom music meant everything, the one who left you resemblances in the lives of famous men: Gauguin stranding his family, Brady’s soldiers wanting to…