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Fra Angelico at the Met
The careful, golden light holds them all – the wounded supplicant, leg crooked and bandaged foot, the rotund cleric who drops a coin in an open palm, the calm virgin, and the child on her lap, reaching out to the world – the solid flesh, round limbs and faces, peaceful eyes. What burdens there are […]
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Three Poems
Dusk The chime of an ice cream truck materializes. A moth ticks obliquely against a darkening screen. (This could be any world. This could be any nerve. This is the crucially useless circus in which I rehearse the bruise I miss you. There will always be a hand beyond weather — fire’s immediacy in […]
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When You Meet
Pity. Take pity. Surely, when the lion lies down with the lamb, it is not the lamb receives the lion’s share. The hungry are never satisfied. Hunger must be fed. The angel, body-less, matter of fact, daubs the door with an innocent’s brush: the first born dies with the last. Someone says, let the dead […]
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Departures
As wild hogs, fresh from a wallow, scrape against the trunk of a telephone pole while rushing past, smearing their flanks with creosote and leaving behind stiff bristles and splattered mud; or a cardinal intently crushes carpenter ants in her bill, then rubs their formic acid along her coverts and tail, […]
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Brooke Farm
The spit bugs have been very systematic, decorating each branch of the rosemary with a glistening ornament. Gusts blow thistles’ heads to smithereens. Clots of down straggle across the gravel. Gone to seed, blowzy heads of dill — I almost wrote nod, how passé. Last night’s singed moths are brittle. The flame burns guileless blue […]
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Mantle
He keeps papers in the folds of his cape Scraps in the folds of his dark mantle Ciphered and deciphered there in the dark Carried and inscribed and read and discarded They leave him and they return Like friends abandoned restored and forgiving They speak to him in whispers As they speak of him when […]
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Contrafactual
Hang it right there, beside The case of striated, alcohol- Swimming salamanders, or prop it On the floor back of where The door opens. Cream and brandy in my coffee Blot out the sweet Potatoes’ peppercorns; at least We’re sitting at the grown-ups’ Table after all these years. On the television the president’s […]
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Sonogram
Sleek as fox fur your message nudges through a lattice of electrons, Nemesis through Oort clouds or luminous fern through fog, evergreens lost at the edge: imaginary gains.
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One to Another (for Peter O’Leary)
How do you make embodiment dear if you fear its hold on your life? The daunting tolerance of unsolitariness and how to garner silence from the outside in How will I survive the broad plain with the form of my feeling at the boundary of faith Shall I have hope inside the throat, imploringly as […]