Love's Last Number. Christopher Howell
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1 Village
3 I Said to God, “I’m Thinking of You”
4 The Wrong Angels Edvard Munch A Tense Shift Addresses the Imagination Goodbye to All That I Thought War of the Worlds Saint Second Amendment In This Photograph Baron von Richthofen Meltdown The Angel of Mars: Two Views
7 Anchors Aweigh Tag Religious Experience Limes Night Watch Lifeboat Dream If the Moon Kept Goats: A Veteran’s Tale
3 My Youth
5 The Nothing That Is Ghosts Author, Author Your Brother’s Face A Man in the Park Masefield in Purgatory Second Message Abide with Me
6 Is Time the Road or What Travels along It?
8 Falling
10 Biography
11 Take Me out to the Ball Game
12 In the House of the Afterlife
14 Voice
17 Step by Step
18 Wyoming
1.
THE AGNOSTIC PIROUETTES
Do you know, Daphne, that song of the old days,
At the foot of the sycamore or under the white laurels,
Under the olive trees, the myrtle, or the trembling willows,
That song of love that always begins again?
—ROBERT DUNCAN
A SHORT SONG
This is a song of our consciousness, that faltering
old man who will never make it across the bridge,
who sits down in the grit and dust of it with his wrinkled sack
of groceries that will have to last. A song of his foolish bravery
and terror, his hope that will not stay focused, that wanders
a springtime path between peach trees
and the berries, humming something, forgetting,
and humming again. A song of his wishes
tossing their hats in the wind and watching the last boat
depart, its cargo of nameless meaning casting flowers, waving
out of sight as the sun goes down.
It is a song of memory’s little ways and sudden corner-like loveliness
turned to smoke and broken glass it eats and eats
to stay marginally alive. A song of the bridge that never ends
really, and never whispers this
as the old man listens for the one spot of silence
or the one clear voice that might be his.
DESPERATELY COMPOSED
I wake on a small raft
and see her swimming away
with a cat under each arm
and wearing the sun
like a kind of sombrero.
Again I have not been chosen.
What will I drink, so far from land?
Where will I find flowers enough
to keep me breathing what
St. Francis called “the Perfect Air,”
the pneuma of hope’s tiny bells
announcing