Translated by DENIS HIRSON
On the unbolted gate to the garden of the dead I wrote
Voi che entrate and was pulled short swift and sharply
As the strain of writing in an unknown tongue rather than
All the small griefs, the petty slights, the imagined
worst things, he’s placed them each
Pin prick of pink in the solution to ensure you struck a vein,
before you push the plunger in. Brief burn then spreading
Came a homeless man, without a foot,
dressed up in a new canvas sack,
tied up with a belt in the usual style,
and an Alfalfa tower of hair (all in soot)
with lint in the vertical layers.
Pollen found in one of the Shanidar graves suggests that Neanderthals, too, buried flowers with their dead.
The pollen could be mere coincidence—
traces left by a prehistoric rat
that ate flowers near the grave—but we prefer
Never again will I feed the mustangs my mind,
Outstretched in the grey moon of morning.
Ours is a ritual of nevers, the lung’s nocturne
I did not love men as I do now.
I loved them wincing & wanting to please.
I loved them trying too hard.
By BRUCE BOND
Let us say you are. You are the girl
who, looking out her window to the city,
takes on the grey pallor of the day,
the way some lizards take on the green
shade of the season they are in, so close
to the garden the garden cannot find them.
Now, when the thatch-roofed cottages
Send up their puffs and curls
From heating folk and pottages,
And steadily thickening swirls
They had had it in mind to adopt a retired whippet,
which would have been easy for a retired ballet
dancer, if she had been one, and easy on the wallet
for him, an actuary. But she was a pellet-
and-woodstove saleswoman. They looked at a basset.
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Celebrating 15 Years