Revelation in Roxbury
Living Like Matisse
Déjà Vu
Ending Empty
Wasting
VII Easter in the Loire Valley
Ponds Gone Wild
Pagoda at Chanteloup
Souvigny en Touraine
Walled Gardens in Amboise
Aquifers
Easter Waters
VIII Writing with Light
Per Ardua
Fools
Camera-Body
Writing with Light
Resonance
Gloria
Sursum Corda
Dark Room
IX Time’s Flesh
L’écorchée vive
Id
Private Eye
Bitch-Poem
Gendering
Time’s Flesh
Un-Building
A Sudden Cold
X Baudelaire’s Deaths
i. Upstairs, in the Quiet Bordel
ii. All Those Little Deaths
iii. Baudelaire, Prince of Poems
XI Summer in Fallowfield
Bells
Sunflowers
Authority
Sunday Morning in Fallowfield
Notes
Acknowledgements
No love here,
not a leaf or a light
as you pass,
just the relentless rhythms of stone—
shoreline, stepped terraces, petrified trees,
the angry roil of mountains in the dusk,
the sea glaciered
into a heat death all its own.
How private, those cities you pass by,
walled in tight and self-contained—
good burghers counting coins
on kitchen tables
after parsimonious suppers,
preparing for bed, for the night's
cautious coitus, prudently
carnal, leery of the passions.
A tight little wind stings
through the bare trees.
The year shrivels and a moonless cobalt
night falls onto you out of the sky.
You in your cobalt dress hurry
westward, into the dark,
that light around your head
growing dimmer with each step.
Love Song from a Medieval Manuscript
Tender as snow peas
in that fragile pea-pod boat of theirs,
they sing and strum
their way across their miniature lake,
soprano, sopranino, alto.
What will he do,
they wonder,
what will love be like
a l’ombre d’ung buysonnet? what mysteries, what marvels beneath the boxwood hedge, or lying in the lilacs’ shade?
They redden at the thought of it,
their hands suddenly
trembling on the strings,
all of a sudden a violent
new tenderness at the tips
of their small new breasts.
Their voices rise clear
and unvibratoed
across the lake, pure
as lark calls, simple as water,
soprano, sopranino, alto,
and the blackbirds answer.
And they wonder
what it will be like
to lie with him
beneath the lilacs, in the noon
scorch of the vineyards,
in the cool black shade of the oaks…
It’s dappling all around,
the light is dizzying through the birches,
shards of sunlight quivering the underbellies of the leaves,
the pines breathing their resinous breath—
and in the midst of all this blue,
this dazzle and mottle,
Camille, partridge-plump,
diaphanous in flocked organza
flounced out around her on the grass,
Camille offering her pleasures—
pâté en croûte, to be sure, and poached salmon,
roast chicken, Beaujolais and white Bordeaux,
a tumble of peaches and grapes
and small cheeses spilling
off the irised cloth onto the grass—
but riper still, the promise of her languid
face and throat, her full breasts
for after, under the far-off fir trees,
in the drone of the sated afternoon.
Cool, cerebral, translucid,