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“... HallFor E.M.Snowdrop, snowdrop, tell:what news of the underground,the weather in Hell?Your toes are tickledby the beards of the dead, theirslanted stones deckledand foxed with lichen-rings of shaggy galaxies.In flocks you beckonme to read shallow-graven names on time-thumbed tomes.Soon you’ll sallow, snow-drop: now so new, yetyour hair’s already waxed ...”

“... I bought an antique sieve of hammered tinFor its decorative holesPatterned like a flower, or a star explodingAt one of the poles.I think of all it has sifted: flour and sugar,Dust and light,What must be ground so fine, so fine! to pass through –Milled, contrite.Light and time it has sifted, like a metal welkinOf punctual stars,The cold hieroglyphs of the constellations,The raised scarsOn one side of the thin disk, stigmataNubby as braille ...”

“... I saw nine dolphins once churn three by three         In echelons behind a ferry boat                  As though a combine harvested the sea,Curving toward our wake as asymptote,         But only three at once above the brine.                  One rank leapt, then the next, so you could noteNow three, now three, now three – a staggering nine!         Gesturing, shouts and cellphones: all surprised,                  And joyful, as if water’d turned to wine,Or pirates into porpoises ...”

“... Central AthensToo full of fret to sleep, I roseTo hear the grey of dawnAnd watch the shapes of things composeBefore the day turned on.A motorcycle one street overMade the morning shift(Or furtive homecoming from lover).The dark began to siftLike coffee grounds. Then liquid, clear,As cool as water, brightAs sunlight striking windows, sheerMusic scaled a heightPast fire escapes, so that I heardA tune that scored itselfAcross the paper sky: a birdPerched on the tree’s top shelfWith grey apartments on each side,An odeon of sortsOf concrete boxes, far and wideBroadcasting his reportsFrom somewhere else, of beauty, spring,And Hope-renewing life,And seasons in their solemn ring ...”

“... Warmer and warmercreep the late Januarys,disturbed beauty ofprecocious flowers,the ease of a year’s first swim.Pulsing in their silktent in the tree’s crotchthe pine processionariesbegin to emergehead to tail to headto tail, inevitableas cause and effect,the rungs of numbers.Column of janissaries,they pour like rollercoasters or compoundcentipedes, devouring morerange each year, feederson forests ...”

“... just the autumn, draining the chlorophyll again.The night sky is the hull of a sinking boat.Stars are the silver holes that drill and thrill again.Beauty leaks away, the face burns hot, Youth is the liquor no one can distill again.I steep and brew a bitter wakefulness:The kitchen’s nowhere engine whistles shrill again.At fifty, the matron turns from the ...”

“... in formation they prepare,Drilling at dogfights with thin air.Watching them, I want to sayThey are intelligence at playAnd in their breath-defying flight,Daredevils of a deep delight.Of course, who would not rather beAn aerobat of ecstasy?But it takes grounding to observeTheir every barrel roll and swerveAgainst the sky, the way their skillMakes the unseen ...”

“... I speak to the unbeautiful of this bird.                                         James MerrillThe peacock thinks he can’t be seen:Stealthily towards the cat-food bowlHe stalks, while I’m behind the screenCoffee in hand: peacock patrol.More blue than the Saronic, greenAs bristles on Aleppo pines,Perhaps he thinks he only … blends?And often, as the day declines,A raucous mob of fowl ascendsTo virid roosts, while dusk definesThe drooped flabella of their tailsAnd flails of needles just the same ...”

“... to smooth the roughEdges of the imagination – ‘thwacks’Piped in to whet the silence of an axe,Or see: those skeletons of ponderous oxenSacrificed still harnessed to their wagon,An animating beam of light now locks onTheir bones and lifts them to their feet to drag onInto this techno-afterlife, and hectorsTheir osteal gravity to astral ...”

“... Philhellenes of the Renaissance.Now comes a new translation in rhyming iambic pentameter by A.E. Stallings, with illustrations by the etcher Grant Silverstein. The handsome large-format book, and the ingenious heroic couplets recounting the deeds of ‘King Pufferthroat’, ‘Morselsnatcher’ et al, suggest Mother Goose or Aesop. That’s one way to look ...”

“... creature or Jane Eyre, the persona of Augustine has a life of his own: such figures are figments that become autonomous beings, acting in further conversations between pieces of literature and imagination. ‘The tendency to weave stories where evidence is missing is the human brain’s sustaining feature,’ Nathan Heller warned in a recent ...”