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...
by phillipw | Feb 20, 2020 | SC
The Undead on Vellum Fragility is what ideas are made Of. They are broken crystal or at most Pink diamonds in fire, and if their shade Were blue they’d be like waves against a coast Of monsters. They are flotsam or like spume On black beach sand. They spill...
by phillipw | Feb 20, 2020 | AS
Ashoka Insists with Hard Things The Maski iteration edict Maski edict (detail) ~ Wikipedia An emperor gives commands and they are carved In stone a thousand miles away. A bulge Of rock gives overhang defence. Once starved Of contact with him, people now indulge His...
by phillipw | Feb 19, 2020 | TR
Hefty Irradiation Since total merging with his beauty (or With hers) will never happen, sorrow looms Forever. Not forever, no, since, for The nights we love, we decorate the tombs Of Romeo, Mercutio, and John, Of Juliet and Christ, and graveyards of...
