Three Poems
from [Studies]: [on Edmund Waller’s 400th birthday, 3 Mar 2006]
from [Studies]: [on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 200th birthday, 6 Mar
2006]
from [Studies]: [on Benito Juárez’ 200th birthday (and J. S. Bach’s 321st), 21 Mar 2006)]
[on Edmund Waller’s 400th birthday, 3 Mar 2006]
What Art is this, that with so little pains
Transports us thus, and o’r our spirit raigns?
—“Of my Lady Isabella playing on the Lute”
the boys were playing marbles on the street in Fort Scott a hundred years ago
and the police told them they were breaking the law and made them stop
and the boys said it was their right by the signing of the Declaration of Independence
Spring is marbles is it still?
so hyacinths reach and send abroad
taws and the taw call
and the Sun come down Knucks down!
and shot across the ground
into terrestrial collision like the stars
[on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 200th birthday, 6 Mar 2006]
so one tree will send out branch to join another and be saved
so the rock wall and its climber
elusive records, books
in what other dimensions inter-live
and returning maybe or not staying
and only in the mind keeping
and the memory itself going
flake flaking flaky from the start itself
no way to throw another after to find
and in the far distance in the interstice
another orb coming
or maybe here its cloud
[on Benito Juárez’ 200th birthday (and J. S. Bach’s 321st), 21 Mar 2006)]
that this one house could carry two whole families
interpenetrant and withdrawing simultaneously and then be gone
but an ascendant stage of other things as mysteries
no more understood but undergone
than who would the life the next night be stayed with
and how get there and be here again
as lying across slabs of yellow stone
to stare close into the henbit in the snow
pink purple tongues of woods
and in the degrees of Spring
in the degrees of families we’ve made
rewelcomed certainly rewelcomed
lifted and let fall and got up and gone on from
and rewelcomed ever
as slow in the slow slow afternoon we are
is the author of Call Steps, Antiphonal and Fall to Fall; and Ridge to Ridge: Poems 1990-2000, among many other collections. He has contributed to various anthologies and authored numerous articles and reviews on contemporary poetry. He has been a Visiting Professor on a Fulbright travel grant at the University of Copenhagen and has received awards from the Fund for Poetry and the Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry.