This black train, puffing out clouds of white smoke, still races towards the viewers. They say some jumped up in fright, thinking the catastrophe was about to occur. The light on the wall of the salon, light from an incarnate summer’s day – so different from the Paris light at the same moment, outside on…
Enough of these silver spoons and tropical helmets, widows’ broaches and porcelain; enough of these bent and antiquated bird cages, and the photo portraits of dead children. Set up in rows on wobbly tables, under canvas in wind or bad weather, what do they say, what do they hide, these remnants of the nameless crimes…
What makes you think I can live in a room from which you have removed – admittedly with considerable tact – one of the four walls? I agree, the view has really improved (not that you can see the Arno and the Ponte Vecchio in the distance) but is the (let’s call it) “radical renovation”…
Biographers and scholars agree: he was mad. But does it matter whether he really used to see angels dancing in the trees in his garden, or would spend long evening hours conversing with Isaiah and Ezekiel? Isn’t it enough that that he left us “Proverbs of Hell” and “Jerusalem”? Shortly before closing his eyes he…
Each morning when you go out on the balcony to enjoy your first coffee of the day you face the same intolerable backdrop: Delos reposing nonchalantly in precisely the same place you left it yesterday. How much you wish that nature, just for once, would cast off for a while its earnest attire and, like…
For Anne Carson In the second book of the Iliad, he calls him a mighty king: λάσιον κῆρ – in Rieu’s prose: “Pylaemenes of the shaggy breast led the Paphlagonians”. In the Fifth Book, he decides to have him killed – without too much fuss, in just two lines: “the great spearman Menelaus son of…
Lower your eyes. When beauty invades your life with such force, it can destroy you. The two ants hurrying along next to the soles of your feet are burying their summer dreams deep in the ground. The load they are carrying will not crush them. They have measured their strength accurately. Your shadow melts into…
After the smooth up-pull the car dove fish-efficient in the tractor-trailer’s wake. By then the thick wheel cuts had tapered down the long, curved grade then vanished, leaving undulations in the drifts. All the way from Montreal through French-toned Vermont we’d held to mostly all alone through night-time Massachusetts, the Berkshires rhythmic now, the rise…
Then, the future was glaucomic, the bore through mangrove in the dugout slow. I recall the water in its color tannic. I see now an olive wake dissolving from the churn work of the screw. A time would come — it seems it has — to redecipher, understand again the meaning of the motor’s open…
Air an instrument of the tongue / The tongue an instrument / Of the body … — Robert Pinsky “Burro Banton a di only veteran artist that go Europe and open the festival and close the festival. Him get two pay.” — Peter Metro, dancehall reggae legend Hearing Burro trace the sky in couplet, the…
(Amy Clampitt, for you) Casual. Flitting skin off cucumbers over a wide metal bowl, catcher for the harvest from the summer market, that cosmos of virtue — jug bands, frailed banjos, picked mandolins, tomatoes as a toddler sees them, mitts of stars — I feel a comet trail of shiver where my sternum is, that…
I. All time indeterminate now so this might be late or early and hardly a day in itself. Call it infernal nevertheless with my first move a descent into air thick with lamentation. I mean tension in the clock as it works towards sunrise and fear becomes natural law. * Starlings in the tree opposite…
