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What’s new? I work a day-job, and compose
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(6 a.m.)
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He could make things work I didn’t even
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All across the city the tyrant ice
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We sleep on her bed, and on the last night
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The last letter I wrote her lies unopened
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We gather shells at dawn along the beach.
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When he was two, my son would say goodbye
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Beg someone to believe you always lie.
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Rumor of crepe, lyricism
of winter,
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Absent! The morning when
I go away
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—for Jose Garrido*
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from The Gallimaufry
V
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from The Gallimaufry
VI
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from The Gallimaufry
VII
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from The Gallimaufry
VIII
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I dreamed that I was living in a German city:
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Another night out with the universe.
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Try to go anywhere Saturdays in Brookline.
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Yes of course, and you are one whose face
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In knots I tied inside of me reside
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When your father’s ghost wants to
embrace
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of ink made me love the words: my father— Arthur, Author, on his linotype—all I knew then, the plaid dresses my mother sewed, the toy pistols, the paired dolls, always dark for me, blond for my sister, the new black and white saddle shoes, the small charred patties of hamburger began in that pungency. As I watched, line after line poured from the crucible of the machine, on fire like the Milky Way. But when my father rolled up his sleeves, I saw the cost, burnt in his skin, a galaxy of wounds that never formed into words. Copyright © 1999 by Rebecca Seiferle |
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that the ski troops would soon be sent to war— made my father immerse his feet in a pail of dry ice. He spent the rest of the war stumbling . . . the rest of his life, at the nail of his one remaining toe, pruning scar tissue. As the socket like an eye would fill with blood, not tears, I never knew if it was a way of feeling again a sense of extremity or just practicing numbness. They say that the nails of the dead go on growing. I pitied my father’s feet, so it hurts to think of them—only now, in a coffin—unworried, resplendent. Copyright © 1999 by Rebecca Seiferle |
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the self drowning in the lukewarm water splashed on a baby’s forehead, the deacon wonders at Christ’s struggle, that figure on the western wall, as if those hands were mere illustrations of an idea nailed. He means the final harrowing, the fear of coming to an end, not the passion to become, not the fury of the newborn crying himself awake, his limbs flailing as he spits up the curds of the undigested milk and honey. Birth? Death? What is the difference? The baby is fighting his way into the body; we agonize the way out. Copyright © 1999 by Rebecca Seiferle |
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seems wordless, one syllable of endless thread. Since his birth, my son’s heard those voices, male, emerging, low-pitched from their bowels and from the earth, the way his father sings along, knitting him to sleep, the sound of bees humming in a lion’s skull, making a sweetness out of death. That sound is the vein that weaves within the womb or unknits a dying ear. It takes forty-nine days to be reborn, death’s unraveling as embryonic as the process of birth. And as we pray, our only accompaniment, our only instruments are made of human bone. Copyright © 1999 by Rebecca Seiferle |
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a moment when our skulls met in a soft rap, warm, unwrinkled. When my father taught me, as a baby, to butt heads, our foreheads tapped together, our eyes sprang open or shut. One day as he slept on the couch, I ambushed him, sent crashing all my toddling weight into his dreaming head. Infuriated, he never again played, though we kept cracking heads for years in other, coldly determined, ways. Now that his forehead’s a chilled dome, I learn the lesson he meant to teach, tapping our skulls together gently, kid goats playing in the kingdom of death. Copyright © 1999 by Rebecca Seiferle |
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of my childhood, a male seahorse floated like debris. Solo, thickening, in a tear of Morton salt and tap water, he snorkeled up pink clouds of shrimp, and from his labor, four children translucent as thought, swarmed round his head, fins like wings whirring in a bare and gelid world. Who was I to fathom such a creature, create an ocean in a jar? When I lifted the glass to look closely, the tide of my touch sent him crashing. He could only drift in the directionless ache, as his young vanished, one by one, his pouch filled with only the current itself. Copyright © 1999 by Rebecca Seiferle |
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my mother in the park, an ancient ballad bearing her away, a melody that called me into being. Nine months later, propelled into the light, I nursed to that warbled sole mio of lip and tongue. But later in the airless years, our mother would hush us before he came home. His lungs wheezing like a broken accordion, he would refuse to waste his breath on beauty. No wonder I was surprised this morning, bird song in the blue ash, wet with wonderful rain, to hear—so many days dead—my father again— O Dad, O Arthur—whistling, strolling away. Copyright © 1999 by Rebecca Seiferle |
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as I ease him into the bath, his limbs rising to the surface drift uselessly, until he seems to remember the dim paddling, his legs all frog. Just days out, what does he remember of the womb? His limbs drum the waters, as if some joy knit his fetal dark and he could swim home in what drowns, still breathe the holy waters. As he’s lapped by these lukewarm waves, an earlier faith shines in his eyes. When bald with age, he lets go of this world, will it be like this moment—floating free, buoyed by a memory of deeper depths? Copyright © 1999 by Rebecca Seiferle |
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Before he went to feed with owls and bats*
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Just once, I’d like to sleep the sleep of the self-
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For William Stafford
You made it seem so easy. Raising one arm,
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At a Dressing Room Mirror
Here is a triple helping of despair.
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Report on the Cottage
—to
the landlord
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The Optics of Speech
Intensity of light is luminance;
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To ease the land into flatness plotted clean,
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Wild Yeasts
Among the bubbles breaking in the kneaded bread,
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To the Faxon House, Razed
Pummeled, pounded, and balled out of shape
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Evening Drama
Her mind, abruptly bent on running out
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Hitching
She planned on driving eighteen wheelers with
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On the Conviction of an English Teacher
The Monkey Man has stripped his mask away
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Reply by the Rhymes
I sleep and wake among the ghosts. The gulf
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XVIII
E tua sorella suona ancora il piano
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Agonia
accorro al suo grido spezzato
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Triptych
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2. HeredityMasking, Mendel termed it—the way that traitsin ordinary garden peas recede then later reappear. The Good Book states: "What we sow, we reap." His science half-agreed. Darwin, too, sketched lines of inheritance among flocks of Galápagos finches: their beaks afforded rock-hard evidence— kinship factored in fractions of inches. Why not, then, trace a second daughter’s bent along high-strung tracks—a violinist on one side, of Russian Jewish descent, and a rustic fiddler with an Irish twist? Nature’s laws govern what will hatch or sprout: what’s bred in the bone must always come out. Copyright © 1998 by Thomas O’Grady |
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3. Small WonderBlood running truly thicker than water,small wonder that, when given half a chance to test her mettle, my youngest daughter will buckle on "the tools of ignorance." She has the whole routine down to an art: the chest protector first, its tangled straps enough to make a beleaguered coach lose heart; then shin guards, thigh-high like a cowboy’s chaps. One time, playing Yogi Berra barefaced to my brother’s Whitey Ford, I took a fast- ball for a bloody nose I still can taste. . . . The helmeted mask, a steel cage, comes last. Old diamond gods, let no foul pitch harm her— my quixotic knight in homeplate armor. Copyright © 1998 by Thomas O’Grady |
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in her room one night and promise that tomorrow she’ll begin another and, in the darkness of an ocean morning, begin to lay out new layers of pearliness to fit the delicate curves of her body or does some inner clock send the tic of time to tell the architect to work again? The inner wall shimmers in warm waters as the side walls move toward completion fitting with the smoothness of satin her own contours better than a designer gown, her shell a combination of Frank Lloyd Wright and Lily Daché. Copyright © 1998 by Joyce Heapes |