CONTENTS | |
| Rainier Maria Rilke: A Symposium | |
| Lee Upton | "Childhood": Trace-Marks |
| Beckian Fritz Goldberg | "Leda": Sexual Healing |
| David Young | "The Bowl of Roses": Handfuls of Intensity |
| David Walker | "Archaic Torso of Apollo": The Subliminal Object |
| Carol Muske | "Requiem for a Friend": Retrieving the Lament: Red Shadows, Red Echoes Between "Requiem" and "Self-Portrait, 1906" |
| Eric Torgesen | "Requiem for a Friend": You Must Change Your Art |
| **** | |
| Charles Wright | Cloudspeak Thinking of Wallace Stevens at the Beginning of Spring |
| Jon Loomis | In the Mirror It Is Sunday Letter from the Cardiac Unit |
| Jean Valentine | Go Clear |
| Dannye Romine Powell | Wake the Tree After Sorrow |
| Michael Chitwood | His Gratitude Oscillating Fan |
| Billy Collins | Velocity The Great Walter Pater Absence |
| D. Nurkse | Second Marriage A Puzzle at Saint Luke's |
| Franz Wright | Thanks Prayer at the Cove The Word Homage |
| Mark Irwin | Passing November |
| Marianne Boruch | I Imagine the Mortician My Uncle Who Hated Zoos Is Small Yards |
| Sondra Upham | Plaster of Paris Hands in a Glass Case in the Hand Surgeon's Waiting Room At the Theatre That Summer |
| Venus Khoury-Ghata | "My mother who recalled a blurred-over death" "The salt my mother tossed in her oven" "We stole kisses from the holy pictures" "All logic's order melted with the roof" |
| Martha Zweig | Mistress Here Widowwalk Generations |
| Deborah Bogen | Visitation |
| Thorpe Moeckel | Poem with Braids in It Skink |
| Amy Schroeder | right, righter, rightest Homesick |
| Angela Ball | Our Institute of the Superficial Our Big River |
| Beckian Fritz Goldberg | One More Wren Answer |
| Lee Upton | Coleridge, Again Women with Putti Indispensable Sign |
In the middle of the formal gardens,
laid out with fastidious symmetry
behind the gray stone chateau,
right at the center
where all the gravel paths lead the eye,
at the point where all the hedges
and the vivid flower beds converge
is a small rectangular pond with a flagstone edge,
and in the center of that pond is a statue
of a naked boy holding a jar on one shoulder,
and from the mouth of that jar
a fine stream of water issues forth night and day.
I never for a minute wanted
to be a nightingale or a skylark
or a figure immortalized on the slope of an urn,
but when the dogs of trouble
have me running down a dark winding alley,
I would not mind being that boy--
or, if that is not possible,
I would choose, like the great Walter Pater,
to be one of the large, orange carp
that live under the surface of that pond,
swimming back and forth all summer long
in the watery glitter of sinking coins
and resting all winter, barely moving,
under a smooth, translucent sheet of ice.
--Billy Collins
Find what's left of him derelict, ready
to rig for moonlight and the exotic flags,
now that successions of snails
lay gloss across the ribcage his pride
had once to ride in. Whitewash work
some few weeks yet, then set him sail.
Season of inflammation
in the canopy, leaves in tailspins,
augury of cargo into every bone hold
hoist and fast, bright
maple lading, the Indian pipe,
sometimes a toad,
and the pomanders of gall and balm:
accurately the rain weighs and stows.
Easy does his most intimate drudgery--
were it I so busy, belovedly;
as it is, care and courtesy
of the hired spider,
and a brisk North wind
to rabblerouse among the wild geese,
strong and splendid arrivals
who wobble our poor pond, preening
the luck from his broken hair
into their wings.
--Martha Zweig