late days of summer

thinking of winter

To Wish Not to Move

Mid-winter is no time, unhousing him.
Is it despair he wants in February,
a distance from the floral throb he dreads?
The freezing lake where water at the edge
of ice is colder, more improverished,
than ice. These raw, uneasy clouds, iron-gray,
spit-pale, pearlescent half-shine of burn scars
in the ache of heatless sun that penetrates.
Wind drags a thinning scrim of last night's snow
across the months-old, still unbroken crust,
a sustained sibilance that sharpens or slurs
as the wind rises or slacks, and is meaningless,
not even the terse, shrieked consonants of gulls
to liven it with their bright, famished cruelty.

chicory begins to fade

The Fifty-Second Summer

The mail is junk, as expected,
and I walk back to the house alone.
Blue chicory begins to fade
at the edge of the road, under dust.
A starved cornfield flows in the wind
like the sound of water, gathering
to rush from a dark sky,
but this sky is faded as the chicory.
In sun the heat is a weight,
the shade as dim as childhood.
I think, July.
Jarflies hammer at the locks.

this far from the sun now

Note to Erin on Some Details of the World

It is still cool, and the breeze smells like rain.  

The aroma of the wild roses is, in sheltered places, 

as thick and sweet as some pink fluid coating 

my throat, with a faint fraction of decay, at the verge 

between almost too much and more, please.

As I come to the best raspberries, a deer crashes off 

into the shadows. I don't think they eat raspberries; 

it just happened to be there. I sit above the waterfall, 

and light comes down through openings 

in the leaves, reflects off ripples in the pool, 

and back up, onto the leaves' ribbed undersides, 

this far from the sun now, pulsing like pale banked embers. 

clock (2)

clock

o păpădie pentru andreea

The Death of Dido (some lines of Virgil)

Henry Fuseli

The Death of Dido, 1781

The Death of Dido

Aeneid IV, 692 - 705

…. she searched the sky for light, and moaned to find it.
Then mighty Juno, for pity on long pain
and a hard-dying soul, sent Iris to unbind her
from the struggle in her knotted limbs, insane
with grief, burning with grief before her hour.
And since this was no deserved or fated death,
Proserpina had not yet snipped a lock of yellow hair
nor assigned the queen to her station beneath.
Thus, dewy, saffron-winged Iris, trailing a rush
of colors opposite the sun, across the sky,
alights by Dido's head. “I will sanctify
this token to Dis and loose you from your flesh,”
she speaks, and grips and shears a tress. And here ---
warmth ebbs to nothing, life fades and thins to air.




N.B.: It's a strange little thing. I've made a sonnet where there is no sonnet in the original, nor even rhyme, but the lines seemed to sort themselves into that form naturally. Dido, queen of Carthage, abandoned by her lover, Aeneas, has thrust a dagger into her chest and is dying slowly and in agony. "Before sacrifice, a few hairs were plucked from the forehead of the victim, and as the dying were regarded as sacrifices to the nether gods, a similar custom was observed in their case" [from the Loeb edition of Virgil]. Iris is a personification of the rainbow and a messenger of the gods. Dis is an alternate name for Pluto, or Hades, god of the Underworld, and Proserpina is his queen.