HEAVEN FOR HELEN
For Helen Miranda Wilson.
FLIT
The black-capped chickadee, Poecile atricapilla.
HEAVEN FOR STANLEY
For Stanley Kunitz.
ULTRASOUND
Brenda Hillman: “The job of the living is to be seen through.”
THE HOURS
After Michael Cunningham’s novel, after Virginia Woolf.
NOTEBOOK/TO LUCIAN FREUD/ON THE VEIL
Italicized passages not otherwise credited are quotations from the painter found in William Feaver’s Lucian Freud. The Melville quotation is from Moby-Dick, the Whitman from “Song of the Open Road.”
IN THE SAME SPACE
Titled after Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard’s translation of C. P. Cavafy’s poem, which reads, in its entirety:
The setting of houses, cafés, the neighborhood
that I’ve seen and walked through years on end:
I created you while I was happy, while I was sad,
with so many incidents, so many details.
And, for me, the whole of you has been transformed into feeling.
SHAHID’S COUPLET
Remembers Agha Shahid Ali.
ONCOMING TRAIN
The italicized passage is from Andrew Marvell.
HEAVEN FOR PAUL
Paul: “What do you mean, I am the more nervous?”
Mark Twain: “The secret source of humor is not joy, but sorrow; there is no humor in heaven.”
LETTER TO GOD
Based on a traditional story from Chiapas.
THE VAULT
The quotation from The Gospel of Mary Magdalene is translated by Jean-Yves Leloup and Joseph Rowe.
“…when he was shown the most famous statues of Phidias and Glykon in order that he might use them as models, [Caravaggio’s] only answer was to point towards a crowd of people, saying that nature had given him an abundance of masters.”
G.P. Bellori, Le vite de’pittori, scultori ed
architecti moderni, Rome, 1672, as translated
in Howard Hibbard, Caravaggio, London, 1983
THE BLESSING
The opening line is derived from Stephen Mitchell’s translation of Rilke’s “Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes.”
FIRE TO FIRE
The italicized passage is from Whitman’s “To You.”
MEDITATION: “THE NIGHT OF TIME”
The final lines of the poem are after Gail Mazur.
Robinson Jeffers:
You, man and woman, live so long, it is hard
To think of you ever dying.
A little dog would get tired, living so long.
THE STAIRS
Homer:
…But when he knew he heard Odysseus’ voice nearby, he did his best to wag his tail, nose down, with flattened ears, having no strength to move nearer his master…
The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fitzgerald
PINK POPPY
The Rilke quotation is from Stephen Mitchell’s translation.
HEAVEN FOR BEAU
May Swenson:
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead…
TIME AND THE TOWN
Borrows its title from Mary Heaton Vorse’s memoir of Provincetown life.
SCHOOL OF THE ARTS
Blanche Lazell: pioneering Modernist printmaker whose Provincetown studio was razed in 2001.
Abiding gratitude to Michael Carter and to Carol Muske Dukes for their attentive, irreplaceable readings, to Lucie Brock-Broido, Marie Howe, Bill Clegg, Terry Karten, Andrew Proctor, and Robin Robertson. And to Paul Lisicky, above and beyond.