TriQuarterly back issues from June 2007:
Ode and empire.(link between the ode and the seats of public power)
Jun 22, 2007; ... In 41 BC, having defeated his enemies in the civil wars that followed upon the assassination of his great-uncle and adoptive father Julius Caesar, Octavius declared a general amnesty. Among those who took advantage of this amnesty to return to Rome and pick up the pieces of their lives ...
Doctrine of Signatures.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> Willow delights in a moist and wet soil --here being silex babylonica. So notes Edward Stone; then adds (to the Royal Society): where ague chiefly abounds. Consider the genius of the doctrine. When find ye a thing seek there its cure. Or, ...
On Overhearing.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> I can't tell what disaster is can you? Let's consider the question untethered from the usual anchors. Fifteen, a- fire (are you still here?), first out of the car, and still she doesn't run into the house but whirls, blue wild wind in a tank top. Her mother is redder by the time ...
Ditches for the Poor.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> from the French, the middle ages--roughly--- as fosses aux pauvres, denoting common graves, by which we take to mean the practice of the period by which are sewn into their shrouds the dead, the bodies then stacked. Language is, in itself,already ...
Tis a Fayling.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> Thus, my guilt; of my shame, corresponding; and anguish, like blood on an egg, I have nothing more to say, for I am stretched up bare in a clover field under many mad stars; I am unfit wholly in the just eyes of the lord of stars, I am not (listen, you can hear this ...
On Parlance.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> He was packed with gear, and in the parlance of the ever ready, he was good to go, thumbs up. He was halfway out the squad before it stopped. His partner, equally can-do and equipped, having left the truck at idle, dogged his heels across the neighbors' porch and ...
Absence in October.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> The trees are gilded ramparts: rising, they come between earth and the blue dome over it, receiving phalanx after phalanx of purposeful birds that steady themselves on the forced flight south, their blood humming a tune from when trees were only feathery green uprights of ferns ...
Lying Awake.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... Night thoughts keep him pinned to glittershapes on the curtains--fallen leaves caught in their last incarnate colors. The fabric ghost white. At the slightest breath a slow, spectral motion. His dream a monumental skeleton of metal: raw light crucifies a few spars of leftover scaffolding ....
Frosty Morning.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... The plume of steam from the tall chimney casts its own wavering black shadow on red brick, suddenly transparent and radiant with the sun streaming through it, molecular lift-off of light becoming a live lick of shade, a climbing vine of blackness, a design that won't stay still, then ...
Bach's Requiem.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... When I saw all those voices--heard them hold together against death, pay no attention to traffic clamor in the city outside--when I saw so many differences could be brought to a single understanding like that--as a flock of starlings at no known signal will rise, hover for an instant so ...
Ode on the Letter M.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> Midway through the alphabet, you are the tailored seam that ties Adam to zephyr, atom to uranium, sword that takes up a new God, little lamb, turns him into a flame spewing Visigoth, and Byzantium becomes Constantinople, the new Jerusalem, hallelujah, bombs away. Or are you ...
Ode on Laundry, Lester Young, and Your Last Letter.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> I'm folding laundry in an apartment in Paris, listening to Lester Young's whispering sax embarrass the afternoon with its lax hold on each note, letting one go, then pulling it back into its bell, strutting a bit, Mr. Cock-a-doodle-doo, and then soaring over sooty buildings ...
Ode to Anglo Saxon, Film Noir, and the Hundred Thousand Anxieties That Plague Me Like Demons in a Medieval Christian Allegory.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> Yo, Viking dudes, who knew your big-dog cock-of-the-walk raping and pillaging would put us all here, right smack dab in the middle of a decade filled with the stink of war. Yes, sir, boys and girls, we're eating an old sock sandwich, but we're speaking English, kind of a weird ...
The Neighbor Discusses Parkinson's.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> The average age of onset: fifty-eight. The actuarial tables propose a date but I've already beaten odds. I age by losing the odd individual page at a time, at intervals, all while you fear a tragic accident. Smile, will you. Fatal and degenerative differ in that one ...
Clutch.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> Something like a clutch, the two of us communicate the will to one another to move, and as one spins the other must, in contact with his mate, spin with her unless the pedal disengages them and leaves them both to whine alone in air without a way to know the other's aim or use ...
The Words.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> In the novel a story unspools in lines, Tangled vines crumple from the chill, And words clear the view to the mountains With an absence of words: no houses, no roads. There a newly released wolf is sniffing The ground for first prey, among snow drifts Punctuated with burnt ...
On Refusing to Be on the Make.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> If I had turned around at the right time and seen what was behind me, I would know what my actions meant: that everything served the same cause, and was known to serve the same cause, as if I were transparent and could see motives flowing through me, like a picture frame held ...
A letter in Las Vegas.(Fictional work)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> Because their words had forked no lightning. Dylan Thomas </Pre> The letter he emailed to your hotel a few hours after your conversation lay on the bed beside you and just looking at the exclamation points that recurred fugue-like throughout it made you resist reading it again ....
The hanging lanterns of Ido.(Fictional work)
Jun 22, 2007; ... At dusk the iron lanterns on the arches above the boardwalk began to light, one by one, starting at the wharf and trailing west along the northern coast of the island. Dim at first, they soon pulsed, like a multitude of hearts, until at last their glow turned continuous. They had been ...
Busy.(Fictional work)
Jun 22, 2007; ... This is a story about a man's whole life. It begins when the man was a boy and got out of bed one day and found that everything in the world seemed busier than a fly in a landfill. As a skinny boy he tended to notice such things more than boys who are not skinny. Even the wind, ...
On Being a Nielsen Family.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> We pocket five ones when we agree, fingered cash our soul's ransom. And a Family Viewership Record Book for each TV, of which we've three. We are the Postmodern Descartes, pledging, "I watch, therefore I am." We're the grand experiment that was America, both scientist and ...
Parable of the American Stag Party.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> Google Candy Barr and you'll get snickers, but not caramel, peanuts and milk chocolate. At 16, Candy blushed as her dress peeled off, demure in Smart Alec, the fab fifties' stag film-- door knock, small talk, then lucky Alec forgetting to yank his black socks off ....
Colonialism.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> In the old America I knew a guy who ate glass-- exclusively beer pitchers and ex post facto his divorce-- impressing his buddies and enticing a throng of thonged neon-lit lounge ladies with postmodern nihilistic bravado. After all, killing the self's the epitome of nihilism, an ...
Old Recipes.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> 1. O where are the long-gone picnic-perfect days when we reeled a sunny woozy loop from house to house, broad Effie, red-faced Bob, with bowls of eggplant soup, grilled crepinettes, wild rice, Moneera with vine leaves, Myrna with garlic snails-- then down to the clammy beach, ...
The Welcoming: An Ars Poetica.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> Distance was the house from which I welcomed you. Time, time was the house, and to welcome you I strung garlands of eggshells and rubies. Thirsty, I welcomed you, you the salt sucked from the tips of braids after running from the ocean of someone else's childhood. I ...
Metaphysician in the Light.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> In the country where she lives now, fat with love and good fortune, the news arrives every morning on pure white pages. She knows the floor of the news factory is strewn with severed fingers, rags, ...
Metaphysician in the Dark.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> His ancient forehead hung with brittle hair, he shuffles, bent-kneed, toward the shore. His eyes shift left to right, wary, bird-like, as if the flight of vision left him stranded, silhouetted and exposed on the white and shifting cataleptic snows of age. Who let him wander ...
A Computerized Jet Fountain in the Detroit Metro Airport.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> Perfect tubes of water, shot from hidden modern grottoes, their flat cylinder heads dryly intact, leap and curve, swift and sleek as otters and equally alive, as if they sported minds of their own and knew exactly where they had to get to and when. Their muscularly perfect ...
Kennedy center.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> Young boy of the Wushu takes his turn in the demo outdoors, tin knives trailing bright scarves that cut clean figures through air, the beat of ten drums sending him gyroscoping, arms like chopper blades spinning before they lift--so even a boy younger than he appreciates ...
Florida: Schoolboy on Break.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> Eager to make a catch, any catch he can, he grips the rod and sets eye on the bobber; imagining the strike, he wants to reel it in to see what's lurking in the water. The intracoastal avenue is calm until bridge jaws open to let a tall mast pass; he loves the clap of wake on ...
Old Poet.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> Vatic austerity impaired now by a broken brain sprouting thin silver, feted one who can't make sentence without a stumble lost in the floating synapse, he forces lips to fashion a loose word-string cinching his audience, do they still love him with their ...
Girl ... There was a time.(Fictional work)
Jun 22, 2007; ... He looks at her, and something goes shut in his heart, something else swings open. He sits there in the back of the bus, watching her board, and feeling this thing in his heart like a swinging door, opening and shutting. The girl does that. Makes it swing. She's fine. Young. Tall. Slim. A ...
In what she has done, and in what she has failed to do.(Fictional work)
Jun 22, 2007; ... Helen Dzurko--raised in the Church and, especially in these later years, still a follower, or, as Father Stankowicz says, a believer--knows she should believe in what is happening on Abe Street; she knows her spirit should be lifted by the sight of the crowds who kneel on the burning ...
This is what we're doing.(Fictional work)
Jun 22, 2007; ... It's trash night. Trash and plants night. Jean keeps hoping Wendy will offer to take out the trash and recycling (endless stout, round baby food bottles to rinse in the sink) but Jean knows she won't; Wendy prefers watering the plants. She has a habit of actually talking to the plants ...
To Keep Believing Nimble.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> It has to be, or else we wouldn't know an opposite. Or what it takes to climb when knees show signs of failing cartilage. We'd never take a shove from shore or paddle palms against the current when the ferry starts to sink the way we read they do in Indonesian seas, ...
Taps.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> I'm going to buy a bugle and hold it to my mouth. Lips is all it takes. And tongue. It's in the breath that has no lapse, and all through warming brass it gives the simplest tune. Hidden, I will blow the ...
Monk.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> He bends to the manuscript emerging under his pen, amorphous roseate haze lifting from the gesture his fingers make, smoke from a magic lamp even older than the gnosis he is moved by, moves from, inditing, word by illuminate word, the truth hidden forever in the letters ...
Yucca Mountain.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> Give the plant itself a roothold and it will undo a mountain. Grows down, grows down. Spreads its excursions everywhere like thousand-thumbed chains. Is no respecter of stone. Shuns picks, deflects shovels, is immune to moles. Leaves no surface sign of its campaigns. A ...
Constellations.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> You rare! You shooting star! You comet! How can I connect my love to you, elusive dot-to-dot, reclusive rocket? ...
The Deeper the Dictionary.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> the more complex the lexicon. Take you and me. The sheets like pages, pulled on and torn off in a rage! The long-dead languages! Ah-- but ...
Don't Come Home.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> ranks first among the worst things someone you love can say. Not even the common I hate you does the damage Don't come home will do. You can live with I hate you, same as you live with the past. You abide it. I hate you in fact can be worth coming ...
Lisbon.(Fictional work)
Jun 22, 2007; ... It was nice talking with you yesterday, and kind of you to offer to call back long distance when my phone card ran out and the little Portuguese woman--whom I agree sounded like my grandmother--came on to say that I had only three minutes left. But I meant it when I said not to bother, ...
The shabbos goy.(Fictional work)
Jun 22, 2007; ... I always dreaded Saturdays after we moved from Los Angeles to Denver to live with my grandfather following my father's early death. I disliked Saturday because it was the Sabbath and in my grandfather's home that meant a day of inactivity, a day in which I was expected to sit with my ...
His parents, naked.(Fictional work)
Jun 22, 2007; ... They gave his parents such an ebullient welcome--"What a surprise! Come on in!"--that Bobby wondered if his mother felt ashamed of what she'd said in the car. "They don't want to see us," she'd insisted. "Let's don't stop, honey." Bobby had hoped his father would ...
A thing of beauty.(Fictional work)
Jun 22, 2007; ... First, you're fired. You're not only fired, but also have lost all benefits, existing and accumulated. These losses are retroactive. You are covered for nothing--home--health--auto--death. There will be no references, and letters have been sent to potential employers, informing them of ...
A place for fine hats.(Fictional work)
Jun 22, 2007; ... My mother owned a hat shop on Kearny in the heart of San Francisco. The shop survived several lovers and three marriages--whatever the settlement, she always kept the asset of the shop. Despite her history, she continued to expect a lyrical romance that would blot out previous heartbreaks, ...
Elegy for My Father, Not Yet Dead.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> The smallest poppy seed in the world still gets stuck in the teeth. So it is with grief: if a fresco feels pain, the wall knows it. Like a collector who catalogs everything equitably, I tried to love you--no distinction between what's perfect and in sore need of ...
Croton.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> Some trees grow better in partial shade. Here is the parking lot where my father forced me to apologize for not speaking all those years to his mother, or else he wouldn't pay for college. Even then, I knew how to cut off my nose to spite my face, like Milo of Croton, ...
Ships in Bottles.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> Somewhere inside is the sea, lapping against the transparent wall of memory. Is it vanity that makes me see the imperfections in glass? In a basement, under the hood of a lamp, a man huddles over a schooner, rigging a tiny sail with tweezers. Upstairs, ...
Pale Blouses.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> Rice blades in a muddy field, Fretted gold bands fit for a dowry, tiny pearl edged coffins. So something else is wordless, as Chekov might have said. Amma is fearful her babies will be girls, But she wants them to be the sisters she never had, Three girls skipping in the ...
Plainsong.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> I see a child in a bed, curls the color of coal Bones filled with fever, skin fit to smoke. She makes a picture with stubby crayons, With little sense of perspective Tincture of difficulty on ordinary paper. A bird in a stream Soaking breast feathers, trapping water for ...
Concrete.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> Sand, gravel, water, cement--an amalgam, as their lives became an amalgam. The trees were making buds and fuzzy leaves while he was pouring into the forms.--Elk vanishing in the mountains, bison on the plains. Inside the house, smell of baking bread. Now adding a little water ...
Home.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> After your death, I stopped on the hill and looked down at our house, but as I approached it did not grow larger. Finally I bent down, picked it up, and put it in my pocket. Now I can never return, but sometimes I'll place that house by my window and watch the tiny, ...
Yes.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> Sometimes in the middle of each April when the dandelions stare through our sleep, when the cellophane, torn, glints in the teeth of grass, and the squirrel lobs its orange fire limb to limb, I am content to gaze into the air engraved with sparrows and rain, into the ...
Psalm.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> And the tide came in and the tide went out. And when the sun set over the burnt trees and toppled buildings, there was a gilded loss. And each of us had a little book, and we began to gnaw on it till the words came or we remained dumb and silent. And each of us had a ...
Vigo park.(Fictional work)
Jun 22, 2007; ... There's a gun at the beginning of this story, placed here so that you know it's going to go off by the end. That's just the way it is; you've been warned. Call it fate, call it destiny, call it the inevitable consequence of certain destructive but all too common human behaviors. There's no ...
The daughter of the Bearded Lady.(Fictional work)
Jun 22, 2007; ... Part One When Mr. Zeit asked would I teach the sons and daughters of the Circus Fantastic, I said, "Sure, but you know, Sir, I cannot read." He said that don't matter and can I handle a shovel with my one arm, the one that ain't withered, and I said, "Yes, Sir, I can if all it ...
Regatta.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> You and I could have coursed freely. Did. For awhile. Before the lake's strangeness netted us. Stuck, we'd become an almost-sun between two bright spots: what had been, what would ...
On Lake Como.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> Drifting, I am equally far from both shores, equally far from the peopled. So distant, the crisp firmament. So early, the white moon's ghost. I could see, as Wang Wei had, ...
Reading Li Po in Rome in 2005.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2007; ... <Pre> All night rain pelts the bamboo roof. Who are we that we must be told something so often and still not comprehend? What are we to do with these days that follow one after the other like the regular rising and falling of lung? The few cats that remain circle ...