I hate using the word "fall." Fall is not this glorious redgold horizon.

...


In the Museum of Your Last Day

There is a coat on a coat hook in a hall. Work-gloves
in the pockets, pliers and bent nails.

There is a case of Quaker State for the Ford.
Two cans of spray paint in a crisp brown bag.

A mug on a book by the hi-fi.
A disc that starts on its own: Boccherini.

There is a dent in the soap the shape of your thumb.
A swirl in the glass when it fogs.

And a gray hair that twines
through the tines of a little black comb.

There is a watch laid smooth on a wallet.
And pairs of your shoes everywhere.

A phone no one answers. A note that says Friday.
Your voice on the tape talking softly.

-- Patrick Phillips

Love was action. It came to you. It was not a choice.

-- Bel Canto, 271.


Afloat

After the interesting guest at the party
declared that Giorgione's The Storm
was the strangest painting ever made,
you flew to Venice to see it. And the canals,
of course, the celebrated light
on the water, all the churches
where someone might be playing Bach
or Vivaldi while off in a shadowy corner
another masterpiece begs to be seen.
So, for a while, yours is a life
of important surprises, which is what
life should be, and usually is
only briefly. You'd like to forget
that Venice is sinking, and no one
knows how to save it. But today
walking across the flooded piazza feels
almost instructive: the mortal
just touching our need for permanence.
So much, after all, is vanishing.
And still the doomed city is afloat,
the water you don't want to fall into
glittering cheerfully as you cross the bridge
to the Accademia, where at last you will find
the enigmatic Tempesta, a picture much admired
by Byron, who in general detested painting
unless it could remind him
of something he had seen
or some day might see.


-- Lawrence Raab

On The Morn Of

The body would shut its eyes like blinds
letting the nearly even lines of light
steal away from its sheets,
straight gold hair astreaming there;
it would close like a glass door, an ear, arms

To be folded without crossing
it would seal its lips on the forest
and let the teeth impress themselves in the skin
of its fruit, feast upon the marl
of the other body like a wilderness. To wit:

Its whistling world would not be harmed.

Let the record show the body
has never made such plaintive claims before
except in the wake of, the wake of.

-- C.D. Wright

I set that man above the gods and heroes —

all day, he sits before you face to face,
like a cardplayer. Your elbow brushes his elbow —
if you should speak, he hears.

The touched heart madly stirs,
your laughter is water hurrying over pebbles —
every gesture is a proclamation,
every sound is speech . . .

Refining fire purifies my flesh!
I hear you: a hollowness in my ears
thunders and stuns me. I cannot speak.
I cannot see.

I shiver. A dead whiteness spreads over
my body, trickling pinpricks of sweat.
I am greener than the greenest green grass —
I die.


Sappho’s wonderful Poem of Jealousy, translated by the Boston Brahmin Robert Lowell. On this page (via MetaFilter) are 26 translations of the same poem, beginning with Sappho’s original of around 500 BC and ending up in the 21st century.

from peripathetic Pete