More on: poetry

You feet! I resign myself to you—I know what you —–mean, I behold in my hands your soft heel, your crooked toes I shape like couplets a cow’s hide, I make it understand —–the length of your walk, the refrain of your adventures, —–the places you will see I put bows on the pink shoes…

Modern coins the sizes of shine swept off my friend’s bureau in Ghent and pocketed by my careless habit— not brown pennies too dull to return they include designer Devlin’s sculpture of the duckbilled animal swimming up to the top swirl and five kangaroo tails mixed to a dollar. When the Irish attained their republic…

Margaret Gibson is the author of eleven collections of poetry, most recently Broken Cup, and a memoir, The Prodigal Daughter. Her second book, Long Walks in the Afternoon, was a Lamont Selection (now the James Laughlin Award) of the Academy of American Poets in 1982, and Memories of the Future in 1986 was co-winner of…

Sentient, it seemed, the snowflakes’ descent, making a midair lake, hovering in the somewhere between weakness and ghost, careless as orchids after Christmas. Beyond the veil of a twelfth-century statue, one congregant took off his Reeboks to pray more ardently in the aisle. The monks were in agreement, voice-wise, with the twilight, the work of…

The Piano, Jane Campion (1993) May it be as it was in our rhapsodies. Tethered to you, oneiric assemblage of sea salt ivory: you playing me as I imagine the gods have, cavorting on their mountain of stone. Forgive me. This our default condition: each of us versions of the other’s own making. Call me…

      The Piano, Jane Campion (1993) This, the ocean’s rustled babble— was it the first sound the first woman heard as she was cut out of another body’s desire, wet and sand-soaked as a shell pried out from the shore? How could it not have been thus— like now with you, expected one, shuttered in,…

Paul Mazursky, director (1982) Kalibanos welcomes you to his comfy cave, and if the Sony Trinitron proves defective so too does the illusion that you had slipped free from the world and its ubiquitous corruptions, that you could simply say you would no longer play the soul-eroding role of mute, complicit slave. Many frames will…

La Dolce Vita, Federico Fellini (1960) In a frame or two, Marcello will turn away, finally having failed to hear her voice, the angelic girl beckoning from across the estuary’s rift in the beach, etching in the sand the divide between his world and her world. Behind him, in that flat expanse to which he…

Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely God is present in this place, and I did not know it!” Shaken, he said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the abode of God, and that is the gateway to heaven.”                      …

What! Did the Hand then of the Potter shake?                             —Rubaiyat The kick wheel turns against the spondees of her feet —clop-clop—upon the floor: amorphous clay shines like a seal’s skin. We are uncarved blocks, says the Tao. Hum-hum, says the wheel. And I am Yahweh at dust, she says, her hands tucked and carving…