The Luggage

Here, in the darkness, where this plaster saint
Stands nearer than God stands to our distress,
And one small candle shines, but not so faint
As the far lights of everlastingness,
I’d rather kneel than over there, in open day
Where Christ is hanging, rather pray
To something more like my own clay,
Not too divine;

(excerpt) England, with all thy faults, I love thee still
My country! and while yet a nook is left
Where English minds and manners may be found,
Shall be constrain’d to love thee. Though thy clime

‘Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent:Σίβυλλα τίθέλεις; respondebat illa:άποθανεîνθέλω.’ For Ezra Pound
il miglior fabbro. I. The Burial of the Dead

I know I’ll lose her.
One of us will decide. Linda will say she can’t
do this anymore or I’ll say I can’t. Confused
only about how long to stay, we’ll meet and close it up.
She won’t let me hold her. I won’t care that my
eyes still work, that I can lift myself past staring.
Nothing from her will reach me after that.
I’ll drive back to them, their low white T-shaped house

I

The house near the sea

The houses I had they took away from me. The times
happened to be unpropitious: war, destruction, exile;
sometimes the hunter hits the migratory birds,
sometimes he doesn’t hit them. Hunting
was good in my time, many felt the pellet;
the rest circle aimlessly or go mad in the shelters.

The way calcium grows

all by itself into bone, microscopic
fraction attaches itself to fraction

or clouds crystallize, or blizzards congeal into hard
ice on aluminum wings,

even the astronauts’ bodysuits can’t cover up
the sheer strangeness of it, the extraordinary being-here

or anywhere, the skin of the plane could easily peel back

Act 2, Scene 2
Clindor, a young picaresque hero, has been living by his wits in Paris, but has now drifted to Bordeaux, to become the valet of a braggart bravo named Matamore. He is chiefly employed as a go-between, carrying Matamore's amorous messages to the beautiful Isabelle—who only suffers the master because she is in love with the messenger. clindor
Sir, why so restless? Is there any need,
With all your fame, for one more glorious deed?
Have you not slain enough bold foes by now,

It’s a spring morning; sun pours in the window
As I sit here drinking coffee, reading Augustine.
And finding him, as always, newly minted
From when I first encountered him in school.
Today I’m overcome with astonishment
At the way we girls denied all that was mean
In those revered philosophers we studied;
Who found us loathsome, loathsomely seductive;

“ . . . But my mind, gone out in tenderness,
Shrinks from its object . . .”
—Randall Jarrell I want to find my way back to her,