pose it was.
Since she seemed easy
bearing its scalloped shell,
pleased even to hold
the half-ton marble well,
I didn’t feel bad for her,
standing at the entrance
these many centuries, still as stone,
like an attendant at a washroom,
which it also was.
On Dante
I thought about those green
beans and onions all day
after having rejected them
for more orange chicken
on my weekend trip to the mall.
The regret eats me indelicately.
How differently. . .
Now I’ll blow around
like street trees: pretty, but
roots not deep enough to reach
the good water.
I rerun the movie
of you driving through
the night alone, and all
night long.
The Greek Word for Want
Though I’ve been to Penshurst,
and Versailles, the house Shakespeare
was supposedly born in (or was it
his wife?) this is my favorite—
apart from the cats, I mean—
I’d get rid of those, and most of
the owners’ things, P.G. Wodehouse
collection notwithstanding. They’re vacationing
in Paris, and while I house sit,
imagining the dinners and dances
(dances!) I’d host if this little palace
were mine, they’re having a painter
do the ceiling of the nursery with Greek
constellations in blue and gold.
How are Greek constellations different
than anyone else’s you ask?
That’s easy.
They have gods in them.
Artifact
Pot shard in a frame:
the same as holding one’s breath
to remember the air, keeping
a lock of his hair. You weren’t there,
or, if you were, you’re not there
now, and this remembering doesn’t
put you back there somehow.
It’s a dream of having what
you don’t: a postcard from Rome,
talking on the phone.
I think to pocket maybe some small
piece that will call it all up for me.
Standing in the museum,
I’m trying to think how it will be
to be back. I won’t be the same,
and it won’t be anything like here,
but, having nothing to show,
I won’t be able to give you
the difference I want you to know.
With Reckless
Just in time to catch the winter
wind, the willow prematurely
leaves, stringing wild
hair behind—not like a child
running, whose speed won’t lift
even the lightest spun
sugar of mane—but like a maenad,
whose fury shakes to very roots,
like faeries, fates, the thumping chest,
fear, future, abandoned creature of its own
posture: like snakes.
Hot Wind
A type of desert pine, Chaparral
is also the street where I was born,
which has on it, sure enough, three Chaparral
pines. This is in Scottsdale, so called
because the largest ranch in these here parts,
in the parlance of the locals, belonged to one
Winifred Scott, of whom there are no
fewer than four bronze statues in the town
that bears his name. His major accomplishment
was owning the land later developers rendered town.
Of the “dale,” none can account.
“Scottsbluff” would be no more removed
from geological reality. “Scottsmount”
might even have worked, since, unlike a dale,
there is a mountain here. It’s called Camelback
because it looks like a camel’s back. Beside it, another little
hill that the natives, early settlers, and hundred years
of Arizonans called “Squaw Peak” was renamed
when Puritans decided a squaw was no longer an honorable
thing to be, for the first American woman
dead in Iraqi combat, when it was decided that Iraqi
combatants, or woman soldiers were more
honorable than squaws.
The camel has a rock formation on its nose
that looks like a monk praying to the camel’s forehead.
He may be praying for the woman dead in Iraqi combat.
Or all the dead squaws. Or Winifred Scott.
He may be praying for the chaparral pines,
which are the only living things in this poem so far.
Or he may be a pile of rocks on a camel’s nose. Or
a mountain’s face. For the whole personified
world in its heat and bronze shame.
A Medieval Roman Theology, Abridged
We killed
this Jesus,
and shook
him, and these
keys fell out.
View From the Ponte Vecchio
for JK
Look at those
statues