Spring All Too Often, and: Miracoli
- Spring All Too Often, and: Miracoli
Spring All Too Often
The azaleas fire up, roseate scars hiding old wounds. We’re in their territory. It must be like religion, flaring into contrition, submission.
Resurrection, too, I suppose. I think of Coleridge walking downriver to Chesterton, to pray. He might have sleepwalked those college years, as so many of us did—
but midway he joined the army. Fate is also what refuses you, setting a torch to the newly abandoned house. To be ignored by Memory is not the worst
comeuppance. Even the best portrait in the end vanishes into craqueleur. They also serve who only stand and hate, said the poet, more or less, he of the devil’s party.
I’ll go after the hedges, one of these days. [End Page 64]
Miracoli
The light-flecked negation of Guernica, brute inks splayed against the dark, came back to me last night in the old dream of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, that Venetian jewel box
closed for decades, scarred by scaffolding, then at last empty, haunted, its gray-blues and chalk whites some vision of heaven— yet boxed in like a courtroom in some podunk town hall.
Easter came upon us, the amaryllis blood-red at the eavesdrop, even passion just a mood. [End Page 65]
William Logan’s most recent book of poems, Madame X, was published by Penguin in 2012. He received the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry in 2013. His book of criticism, Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure, was published by Columbia University Press last spring.
