I approach a harp
abandoned
in a harvested field.
A deer leaps
out of the brush
and follows me

in the rain, a scarlet
snake wound
in its dark antlers.
My fingers
curled around a shard
of glass—

it’s like holding the hand
of a child.
I’ll cut the harp strings
for my mandolin,
use the frame as a window
in a chapel
yet to be built. I’ll scrape

off its blue
lacquer, melt the flakes
down with
a candle and ladle
and paint
the inner curve
of my soup bowl.

The deer passes me.
I lower my head,
stick out my tongue
to taste
the honey smeared
on its hind leg.

In the field’s center
I crouch near
a boulder engraved
with a number
and stare at a gazelle’s
blue ghost,
the rain falling through it.
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Casual photograph of Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell in the 1950s
The Dolphin Letters Revisited

"Life is raw, but we expect literature to be properly cooked. Hence the notorious fuss about Robert Lowell’s confessional sonnet sequence The Dolphin, the narrative of an adulterous relationship in which he high-handedly versified excerpts from the distraught letters written to him by the wife he abandoned, the critic Elizabeth Hardwick."

via THE GUARDIAN
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Cover of The Complete Poems of William Blake
What Sparks Poetry:
Mathias Svalina on William Blake's "The Tyger"

"Maybe my dedication to poetry....this desire to manufacture transcendences out of words, is just chasing this first high of visionary realization & its predicating brain chemistry. One moment you can be a child in a classroom, terrified & trapped, & then you read the right words, & you are free. It’s true. Freedom is real. Art is true. And once you know a true thing, it is difficult to un-know."
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