Issue 108

O, I write to you now Lew / Wallace to say that a deal is a deal / is a deal, and that everything is possible / under our eye-squinting American sky.

After the rain, all over the island
wild irises find their throats
open into astonished song.

The wind unshouldering rain,
they huddle into the concave
of the day by windowpane

Obviously, autobiographical experience, even matched to extraordinary artfulness, cannot be the lone standard against which to measure the accomplishment of a novel.

Upward / movement of us is vain, said Simone / Weil, if it doesn’t come from a downward / movement. Go down to the river. / The counterweight. Down / without talking with father, mother, / brother, sister

One way to describe what O’Keeffe did with landscapes is to say that she was trying to figure out a way to look out at the horizon and to see things out there as deeply as she was able to see things like flowers and plants up close.

The one thing I’m certain you created / is desire, different forms of it, / cut from the same bone far and / / high in the night.

I must take shoes and clothes off and leave them on the bank for nakedness is water’s first language.

Later on, in high school, I would see those same artworks in my books and listen to my professor explaining their importance. Probably because they were within a five-minute walk and I knew them by heart, I didn’t have any real interest in them, nor in any of what Pasolini would call “my intimate, profound, archaic Catholicism.” I was interested in Hegel.