The river remembers nothing about the string of white pebbles that moments ago gleamed from the edge of the bank where I kneel. Nor does the river recall the splash of the child¹s shoe when it slipped from that bank the feel of its tongue that now licks the current bearing it downstream. The river
If you’ve ever seen blue rain please explain to me when and where. I promise I won’t steal so much as a fringe. Tell me if it was closer to a peacock or prairie-grass blue, the blue edge of elegant paper, blue thread inside a block of ice; whether it favored purple or green, deepened
* To burn off the layers of sleep the red poem appears all at once in the scrawl of a dream hastily recalled before its fire dies leaving neither ashes nor a fine black linen rash on the bed-clothes. * An acquired taste, the aubergine poem, its sleek surface suitable for gift wrap the wallpaper
Long a student of rain I was glad to discover yet another dimension of its many shadows. This time not feathery stripes or braided strands but white-rimmed dark ovals scudding across a page. If I didn’t know they’d been cast by the rain streaming down my window I’d suspect they were cells without cilia or
For Jackie Robinson, W.B. Yeats, Schubert, Blake (both Eubie & William), Einstein, Christ, my mother & my Uncle Leo. . .and especially all who waved from the train stations in Vilna & Riga & Pinsk, ca. 1900 After the last wave, they walked home turned to what they had to do: light a flame beneath
