Lyric Prose |
“Water Monologues”
“My wife went out to check the cars and they were submerged. But that’s not what she said. She said, ‘Look — a fox.'”
Poetry |
“When You Go to Venice Alone” and “The Uses of Pain”
“And when he finally appears, / about twenty and no English, / you’ll shadow him past the Fenice, / follow his gesture up the endless stairs.”
Essay |
“Abiding Beauty” and “Battle of the Horns”
“When we were boys, we called it The Cabin, though by then it had things that on buying the place our grandfather had lacked: light, heat, plumbing, telephone – all the modern rest.”
Poetry |
“Fugitive”
“How we touched tongues once / during a sleepover. How your parents // encouraged us to shower together to save water.”
Lyric Prose |
“Under Canine (outtakes)”
“Let Ramón remind the Lady that he is a Blessed Creature of the Living God, no less an Incarnation than she, more holy than profane in all his doings, as Beautiful as a Good Dog on a day at the Dog Park, when dog frolic is the movement of heaven.”
Poetry |
“I Think It Is Such a Beautiful” & “Not, like Venus, come ashore on a shell”
“as if time — those four years / between your births — were folded / and the two births became / one double emergence: // you, and you, and none other.”
Literature in Translation |
from claus and the scorpion
“lara wears a plaid shirt and her hair to the side, like a child / claus wears a plaid shirt and his hair to the side, like a child / neither one likes their name / and they walk down the wet streets, alone / because they don’t know how to walk any other way”
Poetry |
“13 by 13 — things that are left and lucky” & “He Asked and We Married Twice”
“the math involved, of scant numerology / for example / exact time of birth / 6:21 PM — that’s two threes / recombine them all and divide and add shape”
Poetry |
“Donald listens to the whole pitch sheet” “Helena already knew how to knit” “Does Samantha have children herself?” & “Wanda’s mother worked in the toll booth”
“Her very next call, she soberly / read through the things / she’d been given to say. Bowling, / tires, chicken, paint. All of it / ten percent off. The only rule / she broke was pausing …”
Poetry |
“Great Egret”
“I’m returned to the old story / of the swan maiden — // that bird-girl, wife, mother, / then bird again when she reclaimed / her feathered cloak …”
Poetry |
from the “Monpeyroux Sonnets”
“A rainy Monday, everything is shut. / It could be late October; it’s mid-May. / Lights on at noon, outside, rain drums on gray / paving stones, drainpipes, voices.”
Interview |
“A Kindred Feeling”: a Conversation with Matthew Buckley Smith
“I think a lot about art having a double or triple life. One of those lives is an experience or an idea or an imagined something. Another is the potential pleasure or meaning that can be made out of that. They live together.”
Poetry |
“Trophy,” “Pond,” “Oh” & “Fare Thee Well”
“What a thought — it / sounds almost childish, so / simple, as if the sun / had given itself / a trophy when a blue jay / flew from a tree …”
Literature in Translation |
from Victorious
“Those three days were my gateway into the soul of the military. After that, I went out into the field many more times. I didn’t wait for them to come see me on the verge of collapse.”
Lyric Prose |
“a treat”
“We played together until she was called home for dinner. She told me to visit her any time and gave me the number of her flat, pointing to the door that led to her section of units.”