More on: scene

Something has descended    like feathered prophecy.          Someone has offered the world    a bowl of frozen tears, has traced the veins and edges    of leaves with furred ink.          The staff is stiff as the strings    of a lute. And, day by day, the tiny windows   …

I’d like to scale the cord in the vibrating dark, to find the source of all sound, to translate the frequencies. The way, as a child, I could hang onto a knot of rope and kick myself back from a wall into the arc and blur of summer air—that’s the prayer I want. To open…

It didn’t help that the boys are Jewish, and the stone angels only clumsy halfway- hoverers, not as smart as electrons, quarks, or strings that turn like dazed rubber bands in a breeze. It didn’t help that we’d walked all over Paris first. Still, the rose window entered them: a complication, a shattering of light.…

In fields where the late light lingers I can just see the last wild roses spangling the vetch and Johnson grass. Is someone walking there, bending to take in their lightest breath? Is it a girl in a blue-white dress? Even now the moon is rising like a blade above the hills. Sharp cries of…

I was stopped on the sidewalk by pears glowing on their tree like antique ornaments with flaking paint, a green metallic shimmer, hinting at yellow, mottled with a few flecks of red. As light flickered over them, they seemed to flutter like candles in the leaves. But no—they were pears, and probably hard, I told…

Now the lone swan dips groundward and her wings beat more slowly, the scrape of oak limbs wicking the air beneath her breast, the arms of oaks open and out, a narrow hall between their reaching (this the route through which the trees’ separateness wavers and grows tense). She is a clutter of feather, vision,…

That evening she painted her nails metallic rose, placed the opal on her finger, and walked down the block to a party in the moss garden. A friend held her hand, getting involved with the milky luminescence of the ring. Before long he was telling her how his uncle loved to float down the river…

There’s a church where I sit on my lunch hour when the silence within me cries out for its counterbalance without—the only sounds the clinks and clanks of old radiators working in winter and birds nesting up in the buttresses in spring, the mediated mumble of traffic and the echoing feet of those who come…

Santa Cruz Island A white cotton shirt like my wife’s Loose over her Shoulders I’m thinking just Brushing Her breasts But Provençal or Basque this Woman or Italian perhaps Not blonde not Dutch but her skin like Skin like the peel Of skin next the bulb of a tulip The scent Of her the scent…

Santa Cruz Island First water and salt scud tailing twenty yards off A receding tide. Or stones first, the tide’s Measure and break. Or the word seal, for instance, This dead one’s skin slicker brined hard And cracked. Cell. Follicle. Division And increase. Wind first. Or absence. First, We’re not sure. Then upright walking. Another…