for Deborah Tall (1951—2006)
Baltimore, 2006
Not cool for September so we walked
slowly, slowly to cross the still-green campus
gold-struck in morning’s light.
That’s the kind of phrase I’d have used,
years ago, an undergrad arriving in town
the same year that you’d left.
Not apocrypha, as in Scipio salting
the Carthaginian fields, a curse
on re-inhabitation; not the blacklisted
feature nor Jagger’s salute
to the working man, but that
which purifies, preserves, seals
a bargain, signifies wisdom, intelligence,
and virility—.
By CURTIS BAUER
This was bitter—the rain pouring down on us,
the too early risers, waiting in line outside
the National Portrait Gallery.
By TESS TAYLOR
I.
At the end of the pier,
light on a rocking boat.
We walked away from land
and our rented cottage.
Beneath us the planks groaned.
By NORMAN LOCK
Fluent in the languages of unnatural death, Luis Boscán set down on thick paper the confessions of the Spanish damned while, outside the cruel chamber furnished ingeniously with instruments of torment, the fountains of Seville produced liquid acanthus leaves to the sound of castanets.
By NORMAN LOCK
from Alphabets of Desire & Sorrow: A Book of Imaginary Colophons
At St. Mary Bethlehem (which the world calls Bedlam), Jeremy Watt, shut up for insanity, discovered in a maze of scratches scribed by others’ lunatic hands an alphabet with which he might invoke things not apparent to the eye.
By AVRAM KLINE
thday tadashi was driving thcorolla,
four menonites showed up with signs
that said contemporary opinion re
our use of color is mixed
By KAREN CHASE
My windowsill, that skinny altar
above the kitchen sink, helps me
combine death with wind,
and air with birth—
fire, water, time, dirt.
I.
A whooshing passed over us—
and perched on a branch—something
see-sawed in the bright dark air,
sailed the clearing sharp-
eyed through pole pine sapling,
beech, maple and hemlock
My parrot has died in a clinic in Huntington. His life was a miracle
He was the envy of all the birds in the neighborhood. For five
years he sang a piece by Boccherini and knew a couple Mexican
pop songs by heart. When he got excited he whistled at the girls who
passed by my house.
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