Cross
by J.T. Barbarese
The earth is stained
around the spot
where roses have lain;
snowed-on, they rot,
small sunsets, in heaps.
Like a dress getting hiked
to her throat
the blown snow keeps
drifting the headstone,
surmounting the cross,
exposing the narrow,
yet unflattened mound
with a hiss like a airlock
as the wind moves on.
The Ware Collection of Glass Flowers and Fruit, Harvard Museum
by Mark Doty
Strange paradise, complete with worms,
monument of an obsessive will to fix forms;
every apricot or yellow spot's seen so closely,
in these blown blooms and fruit, that exactitude
is not quite imitation. Leaf and root,
the sweet flag's flaring bud already,
at the tip, blackened; it's hard to remember
these were ballooned and shaped by breath
they're lovely because they seem
to decay; blue spots on bluer plums,
mold tarring a striped rose. I don't want to admire
the glassblower's academic replica,
his copies correct only to a single sense.
And why did a god so invested in permanence
choose so fragile a medium, the last material
he might expect to last? Better prose
to tell the forms of things, or illustration.
Though there's something seductive in this impossibility:
transparent color telling the live mottle of peach,
the blush or tint of crab, englobed,
gorgeous, edible. How else match that flush?
He's built a perfection out of hunger,
fused layer upon layer, swirled until
what can't be swallowed, won't yield
almost satisfies, an art
mouthed to the shape of how soft things are,
how good, before they disappear.
Life is Happy
by Albert Goldbarth
I suddenly understand; I'm watching you chop away
at a cabbage, you're humming, the kitchen is light
and knife-thrust, light and knife-thrust,
lightslaw, airslaw, and humming. That would be the way
Life gets its blade out, then goes at it
with a human heart: maybe like somebody hacking
jungle undergrowth, so the whole heart's lost in a minute,
ribbons, pulp; or maybe making an exquisite show
of almondlike slivers, holding up
the fussy ricegrain-sized inscribings, studying
its artistry from many angles, taking years,
taking seventy years; but humming
in an absentminded, pleasurable way, no matter
the time involved, or what the technique -- happy. This
was the lesson, now I remember, carried by the moted light
of the bulky, asthmatically-purring projector
they used for grade school "nature films." The room
was darkened, our tittering hushed, and then a voice,
a grave yet understanding, deeply male voice, came forth
from that machine, while on the screen a grainy lion
brought a grainy zebra down, and this was followed
by a few frames of its running with the bowel. This
was "the law of the jungle," "the law of fang and claw," and
so we understood that what we saw
as horrifying slaughter -- and that zebra's widened jaws
and splayed gray teeth would bray inside my brain
for years -- was part of a governing system, a balance:
there was pain, but it was ordered pain, and Life
was in the greenish jungle vapor, or the sky, all the while,
surveying its handiwork, calmly. Not a life, but Life
was happy, standing grandly in the kitchen
with its tools and its purview, neither king nor cabbage
more endeared to it, the knife out, at some moments
even looking like love, its hair, its hips,
its smooth, assumed efficiency,
its dearly off-key humming.
Mary with Sleeping Child
by David Shapiro
Our mother is always awake
and her baby is always asleep
Are they both wrapped in gold after all
Or is it just paint: a veil
She is ordinary in ordinary mourning
and her baby is not going to live
She leans her curls against his skull
because she is awake but he is thought
her big hands were cut by stone-cutters
when the world was rich and brown
Her eyes are tired because he is an old man
a little corpse in ghostly swaddling
You say it is all for the love of a child
but she would like to sob with her beautiful neck
and her ornamental uneconomical curls
the beautiful that could not save this child
At the foot of the Cross
That has grown within her
she will remember his loud rebuke
and infinitesimal fingers curled together without end
The historians have applied the X-rays
and they found nothing
They were searching for gold and haloes and dates
She was offering the ordinary meal again
She is awake and in trouble and he is dreaming
of riots, earthquakes, cut flesh, fire, open graves
and a lion on its discontented path
and his blood dripping into his mother's cup
Our mother's eyes are open but he has turned away
in a dream of cities and palms, victories
that look like catastrophe, and indestructible fury
and silence which he will maintain his whole life
And silence in which he will maintain our life
