by phillipw | Feb 21, 2020 | FA, HA
Dignity in Ritual Petticoats The rose is like a courtly dance in New Orleans two centuries ago. In shape The blossom has formality as true As layered dresses launched in crêpe De chine across the ballroom floor. The scheme Of petals in their strata, patterns, and...
by phillipw | Feb 21, 2020 | TI
The Coy Entity with Only the Corner of an Eye Behind Veils That essence without essence, time, is not For lobes to hear, for skin to touch and know With tenderness of love, for eye to plot Time’s ways, for tongue to touch its tip to, slow In wooing it to change its...
by phillipw | Feb 21, 2020 | CA, PU
Dido and Aeneas The Queen of Carthage sings that “he is gone” In white-smoke pain. Purcell gives smoke-white tongue To those who lose their men. She acts as pawn; He swells her aching throat and tortured lung With passions of the flames that fill her,...
by phillipw | Feb 20, 2020 | MY
“The Mystery of Iniquity” This tale looms large, that Lucifer conceived His God was like himself, a sort of twin, An elder one, a massive tree that leaved And fruited long before the swell of sin Began to bud inside the angel’s brain, An aching more...
by phillipw | Feb 20, 2020 | MA
Long and Longing: an Indian Reader in Rare Books and Music His eyebrow cuts a cruel line—that left One—sinister like Satan’s as he fell, Or more like Lucifer’s, since he (with heft Of heavenly beauty in his tilt to Hell) Most certainly could not have realized That...
