Poetry
Ostia Antica
Down the Decumanus Maximus till the rutted cobbles give way, just as so many lives have gone before this, past the stubs of the insulae, while each Airbus at Fiumicino heaves itself aloft over the beach umbrellas in row on row where the Tyrrhenian Sea laps, soft; and I, too, have felt Rome drop astern of that imperative bound west, have settled back and been home by afternoon. But this time I smell the dust READ MORE >>
Remains
Near his death Chuang Tzu’s disciples asked why he chose tree burial in the ancient style instead of a dignified grave. “Why,” he said, “do you favor worms to birds?” And so they built a platform in a giant bo tree, prepared a tissue-thin muslin shroud, and when he died they fed him to the birds. READ MORE >>
Eclogues
i. That summer of rain I was a seminarian and visited the Osborn State Correctional Facility. Metal gates opened, closed, like legs crossed and uncrossed. On the mental health ward, behind a small meshed window, a naked man, wrapped in a bed sheet, posed like Constantine crossing the Milvian Bridge. Men hummed in their cells, sticky, strong from barbells. The men had black, brown and white skin, many covered with intricate tattoos like road maps. One seminarian collapsed and was taken to the READ MORE >>
Memorial Day
Behind the banyan trees, the mansions. Behind the mansions, the lagoon—. In the lagoon, a mooring of sailboats. Wind in the rigging. Hull-slap and groan. Where is everybody? The sound of people playing in their pools—well ..., there Isn’t any; the streets Are empty—, the moon, like a moon Jelly, beating its slow float in the not- READ MORE >>
Animality
IN ONE OF Aesop’s fables, an overambitious frog tries to puff himself up to the size of an ox, and explodes. Paul Muldoon mocked this type of moralizing animal tale in his poem “The Frog,” in 1983. Attempts to find a “moral for our times” in the frog’s story are naïve, and threaten to turn sour, as Muldoon suggests: What if I put him to my head and squeezed it out of him, READ MORE >>
Bushwhacking
Vesper Sparrow
for Deborah Digges Said and done I’m choosing the redwing. The unwritten rule is the rule of familiars (familiar having a homely quality), those birds close by, the ones you take for granted, though seasonal: the mocker in the arbor picking at the grapes, the house wren flowering in the dogwood, the catbird mewling in and out of the hedge, the infinite warbler warbling all summer... READ MORE >>
Swiche Glaringe Eyen
Pieces Falling into Place
For Clare
I saw a brown shape in the unmown grass, half-hidden in a tuft, and crouching down to get a closer look, I found a young rabbit, no bigger than my hand, trembling there in its makeshift nest. And I thought of John Clare: this was one of his creatures in my own yard, pressed close to the earth, timid and alone, almost a visitation from the “bard of the fallow field and the green meadow,” who loved the things of nature for what they are. It didn’t run away when I parted the grass READ MORE >>
