Insults of Philosophy

The Hudson River School

A slender glaze of rose doré sending the blood to flow within her cheeks.

—Julian Bell on Leonardo’s The Lady with the Ermine, TLS, November 25, 2011

The sliver of Hudson caught in half-light,flecks of water etched mid-waver,

the check-marks of that first accounting,the gray early-winter scurf

of the park, shadowed in grisaille,frozen like the fur of a dead animal.

Tenants of the House

The peach tree hung so with bee-stung,oozing fruit, a long limb shattered.

Miles from the gold fields, dayslike the galled earth of the dusty ranches,

the palomino’s mortal bluesand purples spoiled in the ditch.

You stood before the camera, holdinga marrow like a fossil legbone.

Sonnet

All is confusion. Much is understood,lost in the fractured hour the freezing windtook to its silences, as in a woodwhere automatic birds live dumb and blind.

Where is the hardship in such holiness?Like the idea of God, or just the soul,the beatitude of things lives on unseen.Where did she go, the girl in the see-through dress?

Her open blouse, her razor, her window screen—those partial partial things that made us whole.

Immortal Wounds

The paint color was called Dead Salmon,as if the walls were fish kill. Only the front doorsprovided a touch of identity—the first thing

new owners would change. It was a meanbusiness, listening to the questionsof our rooftop peripatetics, the rock doves.

A one-eyed tom had staked out the shed roof,planning a coup, or staging Romeo and Juliet.He was Juliet.

I stood at the French doors,which the English called French windows.The heavens opened and did not close,

like all-night petrol stations. In that country,that summer of constant rain,those were the consolations of philosophy.

Asia Minor was no better than Morris Minor.