Finding Place
A fire in the pasture undulates
of blue and white and yellow flower,
a fire like a snake, it would seem, iridescent
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When Good is Better than Great—Susan Elizabeth Howe’s Salt | Susan Elizabeth Howe, Salt: Poems
What Beatrice said of Dante might well apply to Susan Elizabeth Howe’s latest collection of poetry, titled Salt. The observation was fictional, served up in an obscure but brilliant nineteenth-century book, Classical Conversations by Walter Landor, in which, during an imagined last conversation, Beatrice tells Dante, “You will be great, and, what is above all greatness, good.”
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Viewing Kershisnik’s Nativity
A child, a little girl of four,
a balled string of curiosity,
had to touch the canvas
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One Glory of the Moon
Wild raspberry leaves had turned deep crimson and the stalks black.
For prayer I bowed in the field like one of the stalks, no less resigned.
Leaves of silver maple were shed and their underside had surrendered
to autumn mauve. In the eastern acre of the woods a sheet of yellow
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What the Call of the Deep Teaches
Of the ocean what can we say? It is one pure cask,
and that immensely, of salted water to the brim.
Our lives turn such narrow slivers of consideration
by contrast, largely what the eye and ear scuttle
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By the Mouth of Two or Three
If the world were truly and wholly sullen,
the starlings would never sing—never.
They would see only blood in the clouds
of sunrise and sunset and hold their peace
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