Ashes & Stars

Contents

Foreword ix Introduction xiii Michael Scrivener I I Whip Around 3 If We Let Go, Of Course Death Has Us 4 Back 5 Icarus 6 At Last 7 Please 8 “The Book Fell from His Hand” 9 Take the Big Subject: Exile 10 Travel 11 Torn, Filthy Maps 12 Narcissus (Caravaggio) 13 I Have Lived 14 Nature 15 Frond 16 Contents v vi I Have Been Wrong, Wrong, Wrong 17 Even 18 Not Seeing Vermeer 19 II To Charles Harte, Not Alive When Heaney Won the Nobel Prize 23 Why Didn’t You Tell Me You Were the Great Poet’s Muse? 24 Mother from Beyond the Grave 26 Soft 27 Next Time 28 Self-Wounding 29 Obituaries 30 Steve: The Silences 31 Anywhere Out of the World 34 III To Mary 5:00 A.M. 37 Hurt 38 Glimpse 39 Best Choices 40 O I Like 41 You Feed Me 42 The Steady-On Agnostic Needs a Muse 43 vii Epipsychidion Again (To Karen) 44 To K—— 45 Let It Out (To E.W.) 46 Your Dead Lovers 47 Easter 1996 48 The Divine Sparks Trapped in the World 49 Were I 50 It’s All 51 IV Saint Mary’s Schoolyard 55 Lament of Goliath 56 My Brutal Face Has Lasted Four Hundred Years 57 Painting Destroyed: Caravaggio 58 Berlioz Killed an Opera in His Head 59 Down 60 To a Poet 61 The Fate of Books 62 Poem 63 Reading a Writer Recently Dead 64 Not for Poets 65 After All 66 My Poem Making Its Way in the World 67 Here Come the Notes to My Poems 68 This page intentionally left blank ...