Michael Anania

Quick passage into
memory and behind
only blank spaces,

blue stain on pink
litmus or merely
known so closely

something falls away
receding from touch,
caught in the air

your fingers move,
agile water-fly
padding the surface

(after Albert Cook) All day, that
is forever,

for Anselm Hollo I

what is most valued,

“In warm sunlight jade
engenders smoke”; poetry,
like indigo mountain,
keeps its distance;

the light plays words
and figures, stone’s
edge edged with air,
green haze growing.

It is easily forgotten, year to
year, exactly where the plot is,
though the place is entirely familiar—
a willow tree by a curving roadway
sweeping black asphalt with tender leaves;

damp grass strewn with flower boxes,
canvas chairs, darkskinned old ladies
circling in draped black crepe family stones,

I

“At odds again,”
hands moving out
of the shadows.
And now, now
everything seems
definite, discrete,
fingers webbed

This is my advice to foreigners:
call it simply—the river;
never say old muddy
or even Missouri,
and except when it is necessary
ignore the fact that it moves.
It is the river, a singular,
stationary figure of division.

(after Ehrich Weiss) I

Geography matters.

The women were divided between regrets for the homes they had left and fear of the deserts and savages before them.
—Francis Parkman nothing but this continent
intent on its dismay—

As others or ourselves
let’s say—furtive, then,

inconsequent and sad—
or on the edge of thought,

perhaps, or into some
predictable meandering,

the outward accelerations
of water against its shore