Joy Ride
Fill a spackle-bucket full
of black #6 drywall screws
and hit it
with an aluminum bat:
that's the sound, followed
by the scatter of broken glass,
of a carful of joyriders
stopped by the median,
and the sound
of my heart
after we, too, had crashed.
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Knots
The loosened knot
of my shoelace allows
a rough blister to break
the skin at my heel.
So I hobble for a band-aid
remembering how
all night I'd dreamed
of knots in string.
Yesterday in a D.C. park
police dogs found a woman's
body,
her black nylons
on the grass beside her,
each one knotted like a
talisman.
I tied my girlfriend's hands
once
that way, to the bed,
the fabric stretching over
her thin, warm wrists
then over enameled metal
then over her wrists again–
And once I read of a witch
who before the stake
tied hundreds of tiny knots
in the threads of her clothes
to keep herself safe from
flame.
The inquisitors, though,
carefully undid them all,
not wanting perhaps to learn
what I have come to know,
that knots can never be tied
around the soul.
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Portraits
In the subway today
an old man
with dirt under his nails
dropped his valise on me
when our car
jerked to a start.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"It's nothing," and back
to the heavy pages
of my book on Chartres.
He hunched beside me
drawing out some paper
on a clip-board
and two pencils
sharpened by hand.
After a few deliberate lines
he put down my eye
and sketched outward
from there.
I tried not to smile
as I watched his hand,
trailing to the page grey,
then blue,
but read and reread this
to myself about the
Cathedral's art:
"It was childlike, very
foolish,
beautiful, and true – "
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Archaic Mycenae
"It is the sea,"
Clytemnestra said
"who will dry it up?"
On the road to Mycenae,
car radio buzzing
disaster, I swerve to miss
some Gypsies and their children
loitering in the street.
Late-winter fires flickering
through the silver leaves
of olive groves, drag
their black smoke to the sea.
Before the ruins
I whisper signome edging past
a gathering of Greek schoolkids
underneath
the poised, headless lions
of the gate.
I climb over rutted stone
and up smoothed marble steps
to the height of the citadel:
From there, one looks
over the broken walls
down the valley to where
the ocean rests,
the color of tin, still
as if about to be pierced
by the mast of the first
of the sleek, black-hulled ships
of the homecoming Greeks.
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After the Vacation
Your
white blouse, Carlina,
who ironed it with so much care?
A
handkerchief is no fresher,
no better pressed
returned to a
school-mate
after yesterday's nose-bleed.
Was it you took such
pains?
Already Fall, Carlina,
and September, Autumn's May,
and
time to put back
into love the capital "L."
--from the
Italian of Luciano Erba
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La Vita
Nuova
Dante's
bleak
beaked statue shunted
aside by the high-crossed
aluminum
of bleacher
and bandstand, scowls,
skulks in Santa
Croce's shade
his hollow eyes, parted lips,
much as when after
Beatrice,
he bobbed the Arno's bank.
Today, this afternoon,
the
river burns
green with silt. A log thrust up
in the fiery shine
could be a fly-fisherman,
mid-cast
until huge
fat-necked geese,
passing, size it
to
a knob.
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Depression
Glass
Paper,
wood, tin:
these are gifts
for anniversaries past.
I unwrap
your gift of crystal,
or close-enough, of glass:
cup and
saucer,
common restaurant-ware
from the Depression,
pale-green,
and brittle enough
for the anniversary
of something
that
couldn't last.
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Decay
As paradise squeaks lazily
through the kitchen vent,
all that's left me of Vera
are the drifts of cigarette ash
on the flagstones of my garden
where this afternoon we sat,
discreetly apart drinking
red-wine by the carafe,
and the list of men her age she'd tried
in turn: one who'd never
kissed, another's fiancée had died,
a third had sweaty hands
and the tendency to a nervous laugh.
Now things in my apartment
have started to rot.
Already I've tossedto the webbed mold
of the trash bruised pears,
and a melon gone soft on the shelf,
but I left in the cupboard
a single, growing onion
to probe the dark.
My run-down wristwatch
lagging the hours,
I am shadowed unexpectedly,
holding a spotted rag
to one of our cups,
over the sink's gray suds.
Only the orange dish-gel,
blazing in its bottle,
holds in its heart
a last ray of sun.
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Isis
This is a song about
marriage.
--Bob Dylan
Ara, a waitress, dark and
bright
two-weeks she's served me
most every night.
Today the
sky never strayed
from pearl, I walked cold wind
until drops
began to spot
my gloves. I ran, the Seattle Times
flopping
above my head.
Ara, in Latin an altar,
she serves for a prayer,
a vow, a curse,
tonight I hover over the plate
lamb-ribs picked
clean.
It's late, she turns chairs
in the other room. The
last
thick coffee makes me shake.
The other customers gone, and the
cook,
Ara pulls a scarf around her neck.
Rain beads
the window.
Reaching onto my table for the five-dollar tip
her
fingertips brush
the CD spilled from my bag,
Dylan's
"Biograph"
one edge on my plate
against a grey
bone.
The tablecloth is all tiny red stains.
She opens her
mouth,
"My favorite track,”
she says,
“is Isis."
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