In which everything goes backwards
in time and motion
Palm trees shrink back into the ground
Mangos become seeds
and reappear in the eyes of Indian
women
The years go back
cement becomes wood
Panama hats are seen upon skeletons
walking the plazas
Of once again wooden benches
The past starts to happen again
I see Columbus’ s three boats
going backwards on the sea
Getting smaller
Crossing the Atlantic back to the
I was thy neighbour once, thou rugged Pile!
Four summer weeks I dwelt in sight of thee:
I saw thee every day; and all the while
Thy Form was sleeping on a glassy sea.
So pure the sky, so quiet was the air!
So like, so very like, was day to day!
Whene'er I looked, thy Image still was there;
It trembled, but it never passed away.
How perfect was the calm! it seemed no sleep;
No mood, which season takes away, or brings:
I could have fancied that the mighty Deep
Was even the gentlest of all gentle things.
Amy Winehouse
All song is formal, and you
Maybe felt this and decided
You’ d be formal too. (The eyeliner, the beehive: formal.)
April again, and it's a year again
Since you walked out and slammed the door
Leaving us tangled in your words. Your brain
Lives in the bank-book and your eyes look up
Laughing from the carpet on the floor:
And we still drink from your silver cup.
It is a year again since they poured
The dumb ground into your mouth:
And yet we know, by some recurring word
Or look caught unawares, that you still drive
Our thoughts like the smart cobs of your youth –
When you and the world were alive.
“Even Duccio can’ t match
Giotto’ s stage management of great tragedy”:
Transgendered Professor Y. in leather miniskirt
paces before the screen, wood pointer
scraping saint faces, slapping
hunched women of the Lamentation.
Blue-gold tumult of the chapel walls.
After-lunch lecture hall heat.
You’ re in that class with me. We go on
from there — not long. You do The Waste Land
in different voices — Come in under the shadow
of this red rock — Strom Thurmond, Aussie
bartender, Cantonese. HURRY UP PLEASE
Whenever my father was left with nothing to do —
waiting for someone to 'get ready',
or facing the gap between graduate seminars
and dull after-suppers in his study
grading papers or writing a review —
he played the piano.
Perhaps one day you touch the young branch
of something beautiful. & it grows & grows
despite your birthdays & the death certificate,
& it one day shades the heads of something beautiful
or makes itself useful to the nest. Walk out
of your house, then, believing in this.
Nothing else matters.
All above us is the touching
of strangers & parrots,
some of them human,
some of them not human.
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day;
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea;
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;
Save that, from yonder ivy-mantled tow'r,
The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of such, as wand'ring near her secret bow'r,
Molest her ancient solitary reign.
Linoleum and half a dozen eggs
In 1960
Many towered Ilium
A brand name and a shopping list too
Memory distinguishes all things from
Only nothing
I was born and grew
Rooms stacked up into houses
A few trees (maples) welted in their seasons
Wildly like sea birds in crude oil
What amazes
Me now amazed me always but never
Often eyesight is prophetic instantly
She always liked to blow the candles out. Fact:
there’ s only so much you can do with friction
and an intentional hand before the hand burns.
The sound that scissors make in a child’ s hand
while crunching construction paper aches when
she grows older. Even popcorn ceilings lose that style,
that feeling of a cereal freshly drowned in milk.
Ah, the white beneath things. And the black below that.
We come down from bunk beds. We come down from
the funky reds and yellows of the spring’ s summer tanager
