Peter Cooley is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently A Place Made of Starlight (2002) and Room Where Summer Ends (1999), both from Carnegie Mellon. He is professor of English at Tulane.
I
Nearer to heaven, though she disclaims its presence,
my mother, since I last saw my parents,
a visit to them confirms, naps longer
each afternoon, awakening to prepare dinner,
always a great event for her, the readying of others' pleasure.
Even if [...]
This light reflecting light within a child's face
approximates what they once called the holy.
Here at my son's nursery school, squatting a chair
beside him, half a dozen lit like him
encircling our table, I am a celebrant.
Blue-smocked little priest [...]
Half the eye is heaven here. You could look for Vincent in
it
clouded in lavender or white, pearled, iridescent.
But his desire was to line the earth with color,
to draw the rainbow down along the ground.
So we descend: the boats float on [...]
Up, up the gold staircase the sun has run and faced
this goodman with a cane bent to his slow descent.
Then let him pass. So goes the sun's privilege,
to look on everything and take in nothing.
Here on earth the celebrants go forward two by two,
four [...]
This mirror has held my breath up
for the last time, the last touch
of April on my window mornings
has chilled to snow. Tomorrow
the floor will sway or level
under another's foot and steady
the dark will gather on me
in a warmer state, continue knitt [...]
Now at your first word
its interior is dissolving
into deep gold, haze
your eyes can steady on. Steady,
the far fields squat & stretch
rounding towards summer;
lake flies film your stare.
And here you are:
another spring torn off
your life asking you [...]
All this winter I was sleeping,
restless in another body, turning
some living secret of the unborn,
my features anyone's or yours.
Now as my windows darken
with rich, brown furrows of the spring,
my small car rides the wind
going into you; Eden, Lit [...]
There is no Spring in Michigan this year.
I should know. I am visiting the unfamiliar
sitting down to dinner in the nursing home
with my parents, every night and out of time—
Spring will come later, after Fall or never.
The weatherman announced it [...]
There is a Florida beyond the stars. It is the same state I find waking here, alone with my aloneness in the dark, all things now possible because my own.
Ponce de Leon, I live in you today, my little barque awash in Florida such as the stars and I alone can know. These are mornings I'm sailing through your name, years falling from me as I take it in, foretaste of that great future we sail to, imaginat [...]
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