Window
By Poetry Issue 63
He looks skyward and sees he forgot to snap off the lamp in his upstairs study. He’d call it aging, but aging is not, he tells himself, a downward slope. He hadn’t climbed to get here. His life isn’t a hill. It’s more like a long sleep, with tens of thousands of dreams, dreams of…
Read MorePassage
By Poetry Issue 64
On the swift cruise there was only time and water, twin mothers of an anxious son. And money. In the long end of day we pushed right at the sun and failed again except at witness, the beauty softened by mist and latitude until we could almost bear it. What else could we do? We…
Read MoreMolest the Dead
By Poetry Issue 64
for A.M. Fine I Molest the dead. Take from them their buried honey. Envy them their past perfect tense, their had done and hurried gone. Harry them, for bars of iron cannot deter their passing. Hate, heat, hoar cannot injure their integument nor corrupt what worms have gowned and mastered with their ferried van lines…
Read MoreTaking the Byzantine Path to Monastiri Aghiou Ioannou
By Poetry Issue 64
You let your feet decide how to walk it, andante or andantino— only allow your breathing to become what wind is in the eucalyptus, now a susurrus, now a slow erasure of distractions. Cries from the soccer field and the street noise in Skala dissolve in the attention the stones require you give each footfall.…
Read MoreLessons
By Poetry Issue 64
To cure the hard habit of anger, eat an orange so slowly the juice spills from your fingers and waters the wild gladioli that purple the stones on high Kastelli. To learn patience, go with Ritsa to the little stoa of a shop in Skala, where old Pandalis weighs the small bags of chickpeas and…
Read MoreWhat Is Offered
By Poetry Issue 64
Early light brightens the blue shutters, overspilling the foot of the bed we sleep in. It is quiet yet…deep and tidal when I hear the light say, You will not be given to do everything you want. I remain quiet, as nearly poised as the edge of salt in the air that fills the room.…
Read MoreOriana Fallaci in New York
By Poetry Issue 65
So little was the warrior, how she held out her slimmed down arms to the flowers I carried and to all that which crumbled in such a theatrical New York evening she was lovely and bright, drinking the last of the champagne to avoid that burning in her throat— And she raised her clear eyes…
Read MoreThree Small Elegies, on Leaving Gotland
By Poetry Issue 65
1 the droning dies down, the sea steps back, leaving salt on stone foreheads, on the years’ shells and that which we so stubbornly call poetry. come, sit here, on this wind and wave crumbled shore and let’s be silent for so long, till night lowers eyelids on the open sea and no one remembers…
Read MoreThey Went On and On…
By Poetry Issue 65
They went on and on, singing “In Memory Forever,” Though it seemed, rather, that what there was to remember Was only things falling apart, ice under the eaves, And the singing itself. On and on they went as they counted, recalling How many of them earth’s ice-mold had covered, While here and there hysterical women…
Read MoreDomus
By Poetry Issue 65
Eyes set into the ridgepole, the house peers down at the man. Now and then the ears tremble, Such sensitive, discerning walls: love one minute, invective the next, then fist-pounding panic. God is touched by the house the man has made, God whose eyes peer down from the ridgepole of the world. The house begs…
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