When night draws near the mountains are clear and pure — like a philosophy student before exams. Clouds escort the dark sun to the shaded avenue’s end and slowly take their leave, but no one cries. Look, look greedily, when dusk approaches, look insatiably, look without fear. Translated by Clare Cavanagh
In the winter of 1848, an epidemic of typhus ravaged Upper Silesia, a largely Polish mining and agricultural enclave in the Prussian Empire. Months earlier, heavy floods had destroyed large swaths of cropland, leaving the peasants to subsist on a paltry diet of clover, grass, and rotten potatoes. Weakened by starvation, they readily succumbed to…
MONDRIAN Mondrian’s closest friend was the Dutch painter Eli Streep, a Jew who was caught in a raid in Paris in 1942 and murdered. Mondrian had escaped by then, via London to New York. Streep and Mondrian saw each other almost every day in Paris during the many years they both lived in the same…
I For as long as human beings have had governments, they have worried about public corruption. The Hebrew Bible warns repeatedly that those in authority — especially judges — should not take bribes, “for bribes blind the clear-sighted and upset the pleas of those in the right.” The Arthashastra, a third-century Indian text on the…
Above the forest of the parakeets, A parakeet of parakeets prevails, A pip of life amid a mort of tails. (The rudiments of tropics are around, Aloe of ivory, pear of rusty rind.) His lids are white because his eyes are blind. He is not paradise of parakeets, Of his gold ether, golden alguazil, Except…
In an already classic episode of Black Mirror, called “Arkangel” and directed by Jodie Foster, a single mother has her daugh- ter grafted with a cerebral implant connected to a screen. The system, known as Arkangel, allows Marie to monitor Sarah’s every action, and also to suppress stimuli that might cause her daughter distress. The…
The air is sharp with dust: it’s hard to breathe. The sky’s scraped white with it, the light turns gold And ominous. I cough and cough and cough. It blows each year from Africa, a seethe That Pollocks the parked cars with ochre, rust, The powdered pigments for the nimbus on The icon of a…
When I was small, my grandmother, who taught piano, told me someday I would learn to “read” music; I was astonished! What ogres, what emperors, what gingerbread, what coffins of glass? Perched on five telephone wires, birds noted their gibberish, like an unspooled Phaistos disk. When grown-ups crescendo-ed overhead, when discords tensed for the felted…
Even though she has set down The unwieldy entablature And walked back into her life, Her posture, Her disheveled intricate coiffure, Betray preoccupation. Preparing dinner, she slices The fluted celery stalk into drums, The mushrooms into ionic capitals. She is too old to be young anymore, The moonlight petrifies. She has left…
Hat on the bed, A peacock feather Dragged indoors From the blue-eyed weather, Reflection smashed, A baker’s dozen, Chain letter from An estranged cousin, The bumbershoot Bloomed in the hall, The ladder’s lintel, The owl’s call, The horseshoe’s frown, The salt knocked over & not tossed across The left shoulder, A…
(with a nod to X.J. Kennedy) The rope that makes of air a sphere, Or else a grin from ear to ear, Is something earth-bound feet must clear When the parabola swings round. Right before the snapping sound, You have to float above the ground. The trick is tempo, neither slow Nor…
On the gloomy days, when the American catastrophes are too much to bear, I turn to my bookcases for solace and even something like friendship, and the shelves throw a welcoming arm over me. The bookcases are organized on the principle of no principle, and nowhere among them is there a section dedicated strictly to…
