You are the snow I've never known

                                             by Robert Thomas

The Blizzard

You'll never take off your blue cashmere
for me, your jade belt, or even your white
walking shoes that squeak like a nurse's.

Who are you with now, taking his pulse?
Why am I just well enough not to warrant
your care? Those snow-white stockings
will never drift on my floor like waterlilies.

I will row the boat of my sleek, narrow bed
to the center of the lake and bask in the sun,
opening my basket of strawberries, a buttery
cheese, and a musky bottle of Spanish wine,
and very gently, carefully get drunk alone.

I've had the sun's pleasures, but you are the snow
I've never known. I can only imagine the falling
crystals on my tongue, each one the moist word
of a poem in a language I barely know, fleurs,
chaleurs, douleurs ... the blizzard of your body.

I think of Ötzi, the Ice Man, 5,000 years ago
in the southern Alps, herding his sheep home.
He was prepared for anything: a quiver of cherry
and dogwood arrows, a longbow of yew, an ax
of burnished copper, mushrooms and einkorn
in a leather pouch, stripes and a cross of blue-
black soot tattooed on his ankles and back.

When the snow came, he didn't have a chance.
An unusually warm summer, tourists on a picnic,
salami and orange soda in their packs. They saw
the back of his skull jut from the thawing snow
and made a call from their cell phone, talking
excitedly in a language that meant nothing
to Ötzi: strange vowels, inhuman consonants.

I think if you gave yourself to me for just one
afternoon, sunlight lapping at the lace curtains,
I would be lost in a livid white storm within four
howling walls. My extremities would start to go
numb, sensation shrink to an azure flame, my lips
just starting to form the first words of your language.

The Atlantic Monthly, July 2002.

The roar of our wedding march

                 by Wisława Szymborska, translated by Clare Cavanagh

My fallen, my turned to dust, my earth,
assumes the shape he has in the photograph:
with a leaf’s shadow on his face, with a seashell in his hand,
he sets out toward my dream.

He wanders through darknesses extinguished since never,
through emptinesses opened to themselves forever,
through seven times seven times seven silences.

He appears on the other side of my eyelids,
in the one and only world that he can reach.
His shot heart beats.
A first wind stirs from his hair.

A meadow spreads between us.
Skies come flying with clouds and birds,
mountains rise silently on the horizon
and a river flows downward, searching for the sea.

You can see so far, so far,
that day and night turn simultaneous,
and all seasons of the year occur at once.
A four-quartered moon unfolds its fan,
snowflakes swarm beside butterflies,
fruit falls from the blossoming tree.

We draw closer. In tears,
in smiles, I don’t know. Just one step more
and we’ll listen to your shell together,
to the roar of a thousand orchestras,
to the roar of our wedding march.

Desires you nursed of a winter night

                                   by A. E. Stallings

Actaeon

The hounds, you know them all by name.
You fostered them from purblind whelps
At their dam’s teats, and you have come
To know the music of their yelps:

High-strung Anthee, the brindled bitch,
The blue-tick coated Philomel,
And freckled Chloe, who would fetch
A pretty price if you would sell—

All fleet of foot, and swift to scent,
Inexorable once on the track,
Like angry words you might have meant,
But do not mean, and can’t take back.

There was a time when you would brag
How they would bay and rend apart
The hopeless belling from a stag.
You falter now for the foundered hart.

Desires you nursed of a winter night —
Did you know then why you bred them—
Whose needling milk-teeth used to biteThe master’s hand that leashed and fed them?

A. E. Stallings, “Actaeon” from Hapax. 2006,

The soft alabaster of the pectoral

                                                 by Geffrey Davis

What I Mean When I Say Chinook Salmon

My father held the unspoken version of this story
along the bridge of his shoulders: This is how
we face and cast to the river — at angles.
This is how we court uncertainty. Here, he taught
patience before violence — to hold, and then
to strike. My fingers carry the stiff

memory of knots we tied to keep a 40-lb. King
from panicking into the deep current
of the stream. Back home, kneeling
at the edge of the tub with our kills, he showed
the way to fillet a King: slice into the soft
alabaster of the pectoral, study the pink-rose notes

from the Pacific, parse waste and bone from flesh. Then,
half asleep, he’d put us to bed, sometimes with kisses.

 From Geffrey Davis, Revising the Storm,’ 2014.

Tipped myself like brimmed-over wine

by Laura Fargas

CLOSER

Most of what matters to me

can be touched, but must be left

untouched, the bell hunched

over its silence until the moment

of telling. Saint Augustine said

when he prayed, even the straw

beneath his knees shouted to

distract him. Today is the day

of the small-eared rabbit lying

on her side, at ease near me.

I don't believe animals can tell

who they don't need to be afraid of,

though if I had that gift, I would have

tipped myself like brimmed-over wine

into his arms anyway. The ducks

in front of me now sway in their

one-legged sleep like dreaming trees.

What would it feel like to stroke

a mallard's purple wingflash?

Every moment in this dulling light

at the edge of a lake brings

a harvest of desires. What tames

these ducks? Occasional food,

but they came to me a second time

after not receiving food. Not

trust, not stupidity, but a habit

of patience and a long wanting.

From The Atlantic Monthly, October 2002.

The musical fountain is here

                                               by Grace Schulman

Crossing the Square

Squinting through eye-slits in our balaclavas,
we lurch across Washington Square Park 
hunched against the wind, two hooded figures 
caught in the monochrome, carrying sacks

of fruit, as we’ve done for years. The frosted, starch-
stiff sycamores make a lean Christmas tree
seem to bulk larger, tilted under the arch
and still lit in three colors. Once in January,

we found a feather here and stuffed the quill 
in twigs to recall that jay. The musical fountain 
is here, its water gone, a limestone circle
now. Though rap succeeds the bluegrass strains

We’ve played in it, new praise evokes old sounds. 
White branches mimic visions of past storms;
some say they’ve heard ghosts moan above this ground, 
once a potter’s field. No two stones are the same,

of course: the drums, the tawny pears we hold, 
are old masks for new things. Still, in a world 
where fretted houses with façades are leveled 
for condominiums, not much has altered

here. At least it’s faithful to imagined
views. And, after all, we know the sycamore
will screen the sky in a receding wind.
Now, trekking home through grit that’s mounting higher,

faces upturned to test the whirling snow,
in new masks, we whistle to make breath-clouds form 
and disappear, and form again, and O, 
my love, there’s sun in the crook of your arm.

Grace Schulman, “Crossing the Square” from Days of Wonder: New and Selected Poems. 2002.

Inside the common hazards and orders of things

by W. S. Di Piero

Chicago and December

Trying to find my roost
one lidded, late afternoon,
the consolation of color
worked up like neediness,
like craving chocolate,
I’m at Art Institute favorites:
Velasquez’s “Servant,”
her bashful attention fixed
to place things just right,
Beckmann’s “Self-Portrait,”
whose fishy fingers seem
never to do a day’s work,
the great stone lions outside
monumentally pissed
by jumbo wreaths and ribbons
municipal good cheer
yoked around their heads.
Mealy mist. Furred air.
I walk north across
the river, Christmas lights
crushed on skyscraper glass,
bling stringing Michigan Ave.,
sunlight’s last-gasp sighing
through the artless fog.
Vague fatigued promise hangs
in the low darkened sky
when bunched scrawny starlings
rattle up from trees,
switchback and snag
like tossed rags dressing
the bare wintering branches,
black-on-black shining,
and I’m in a moment
more like a fore-moment:
from the sidewalk, watching them
poised without purpose,
I feel lifted inside the common
hazards and orders of things
when from their stillness,
the formal, aimless, not-waiting birds
erupt again, clap, elated weather-
making wing-clouds changing,
smithereened back and forth,
now already gone to follow
the river’s running course. 

Poetry, June 2006.