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After the month in Sicily, the ocean’s edge unravelling around our own volcanic knees; after the dark plums that throbbed like fairy tale hearts in the woodsman’s basket; the voyage in another’s arms where we were innocent as tourists visiting familiar landscapes for the first time we come back to our old lives as to…
map-makers of old used to call the “terra incognita” blanks “sleeping beauties” The first hundred years passed quickly. She slept, or pretended to sleep, until no one burst into her chamber to cry “Your Majesty, the New World, a conspiracy of cartographers . . . oh” There was a land between sleeping and waking where…
”Every time we get a big gale around here some people just refuse to batten down.” we estimate that ice skating into a sixty mile an hour wind, fully exerting the legs and swinging arms you will be pushed backward an inch every twenty minutes. in a few days, depending on the size of the…
May again and poems leaf out from this old typewriter shading the desk in half light. You at a college desk study different poems, hold them warily by their dry stems— so many leaves pressed to death in a heavy book. When you forget again to call it’s poet and parent both that you deny….
—the Queen of Persia Speaks 1. Could anything disturb the design Of this garden? The golden iris Threaded through the grass, The magnolias burning into blossom, Create an illusion of wilderness. Could anything disturb the design Of your hand placed over mine? You have memorized The gestures appropriate To this setting, the reflecting Pool, and…
This animal will not move a greater weight than it is used to—taken too far it does the same; stops, and so the merchants are obliged to lodge there. I Shelley, Goya, Van der Weyden The Bug River ice scratched by Austrians with lead in their feet, and the hot fomentations of the Cuyahoga lit by…
1. If I had to guess, I’d say some other house, and some street less atterial. Nothing’s at my back and east seems arbitrary as coin. Dawn might come anywhere in this flat land bewildering as elms and horses, Twenty-nine years after his class and thirteen after his death I’m here to pick up the…
You sent the letter to an old address and now I receive it, three days after the news of your death. You’re already in the ground. I hold the letter to the window as if mere light could dissolve the paper seal. I think of miracles: how one evening I turned my wineglass and flashed…
Now that mills control the snarlers, the backbiter winds who can guess where the waters have gone? Only we know—they pestled this Yankee’s thoughts to a gold-nugget juggernaut reel, footwork ground down to decimals smaller than thought: his profit shoved up the high-water mark on our masthead. At 40 he balances his millstone on a…
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