“A white doe in the green grass of a glade Appeared to me with two horns made of gold . . .” —Petrarch All joy, being considered in its truth, Has in it both the terrible and good. You will not know the beauty of the deer Until you’ve lain her low within the wood….
Her whistle is climbing its spiral stair And loathe are my evenings, loathe of bone, And fir trees are steeples in the air, And every confession is told alone. The little lung beats the feathered snare, And fair is my sunset, fair of light, And here bend the proverbs, the tricky prayer, And I sit…
after Manet Smudge of ivory cameo (another lady’s face, but anonymous) lists from black ribbon. To her, she offers a petite bundle of lilac. The African grey contemplates a beyond beyond its empty dish, no droplet or seed to hold its attention. This is discipline. The blue velvet hair bow and red (parted, kempt) complement…
Born from pastel clouds and blushed as health, each a painted infant, gessoed and reaching. Kin to Monet’s faraway “Jar of Peaches,” seeded into the clay spectacular to commune and dream and flower, achieving at the center the divided brain of human nature: split between the orchard’s timetabled logic and the sumptuous urge toward art,…
How long had it languished, erotic in the stalls of oil paintings and furs cryptic as the decrepit hutch where rabbits are generations gone? How well hid in the warrens of the flea market, then deeper as if back into the camera’s aperture, suddenly abloom as a daisy in the cemetery dirt that nurtured it….
Sculptural swan, left behind earring sworn to the garden, as after an encounter on a carpet, risen then into a different person. When a thing alights, its missingness elevates prettiness into art. All of life in the sunset-fired contours. Your life poured into looking.
On December 8, 2015, French President François Hollande announced plans to posthumously award the Legion of Honour to the one hundred and thirty victims of the terrorist attacks of November 13 at the Bataclan concert hall and the surrounding area. The institution’s Grand Chancellor disagreed. Since its creation on May 19, 1802, by Napoléon Bonaparte,…
It was just a B-grade submarine movie (or maybe all sub movies are B-grade), a vehicle for John Wayne, whose drawling virility I always resent, while Patricia Neal plays his ex-wife, though off-screen her lover Gary Cooper visited the set to try to persuade her to abort their fetus. And after all the khaki, depth…
For years I lived on the mountain, but I never drank from the high stream where it flashes over gray scree on its way down to the valley after percolating through the glacier that holds grains of carbon and pollen, maize and grasses, smoke, plague and famine, spores of fungus on the manure of cattle,…
It was almost vulgar the way that it was just so pronounced, how innocent they were. —photojournalist Lynsey Addario, 3.15.22 On the front page of the newspaper this morning, there was a photograph of a mother and her children killed by a Russian mortar round as they tried to flee across a ruined bridge. They…
Sunrise lines a cloud: flamingo silk in an old fur coat. Seagulls catch the wind like scraps of paper. She’s been up for hours, wrapped in her old plaid bathrobe. Migraine. Lightning flashes behind her eyelids. She drinks her coffee and writes: the tattered world. Later there will be champagne and candlelight Phone calls from…
Ripe olives drop from the tree, grapes glow green in the sun, bursting, already smelling a little of decay. A thousand miles away, the emperor slogs through mud with his grumbling soldiers. His son is worthless, possibly insane. At night in his tent he writes of odd accidental pleasures: bread splitting its crust in the…
