Phases. Mischa Willett

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СКАЧАТЬ of mane—but like a maenad,

      whose fury shakes to very roots,

      like faeries, fates, the thumping chest,

      fear, future, abandoned creature of its own

      posture: like snakes.

      Hot Wind

      A type of desert pine, Chaparral

      is also the street where I was born,

      which has on it, sure enough, three Chaparral

      pines. This is in Scottsdale, so called

      because the largest ranch in these here parts,

      in the parlance of the locals, belonged to one

      Winifred Scott, of whom there are no

      fewer than four bronze statues in the town

      that bears his name. His major accomplishment

      was owning the land later developers rendered town.

      Of the “dale,” none can account.

      “Scottsbluff” would be no more removed

      from geological reality. “Scottsmount”

      might even have worked, since, unlike a dale,

      there is a mountain here. It’s called Camelback

      because it looks like a camel’s back. Beside it, another little

      hill that the natives, early settlers, and hundred years

      of Arizonans called “Squaw Peak” was renamed

      when Puritans decided a squaw was no longer an honorable

      thing to be, for the first American woman

      dead in Iraqi combat, when it was decided that Iraqi

      combatants, or woman soldiers were more

      honorable than squaws.

      The camel has a rock formation on its nose

      that looks like a monk praying to the camel’s forehead.

      He may be praying for the woman dead in Iraqi combat.

      Or all the dead squaws. Or Winifred Scott.

      He may be praying for the chaparral pines,

      which are the only living things in this poem so far.

      Or he may be a pile of rocks on a camel’s nose. Or

      a mountain’s face. For the whole personified

      world in its heat and bronze shame.

2

      A Medieval Roman Theology, Abridged

      We killed

      this Jesus,

      and shook

      him, and these

      keys fell out.

      View From the Ponte Vecchio

      for JK

      Look at those

      statues effaced—

      all that rain:

      water erasing

      the masonry—

      time, fame.

      Sprezzatura

      Do not, like a purse-dog,

      like a show pony, bare

      your infirm affection for

      everyone in the colosseum

      to see. Better for them

      to guess at your secret

      desires, your lusts

      and ambition, better

      for them to detect in

      your stride some adroit

      manner, in your eye

      some devious shine, and think:

      I should be careful

      around this one.

      They should.

      Better for you to know,

      and be thinking, there is

      a tangle of passages

      and thruways intricate

      as arteries teeming under

      the gladiatorial contest.

      A Lie, their Hands

      at the Bocca Della Verita

      Here’s the spot they stitched

      the coin of his face back into

      itself; you can trace

      with your finger the rough

      splice running over his eye

      where someone tried to make

      it look as though the circle hadn’t

      broken, that truth was still spoken

      from the mouth thereof

      and people hadn’t lined up to tell a lie,

      their hands shoved down his throat.

      It says something about our senses

      of restoration, no? And something else

      about the past. What, exactly?

      Ask.

      Mnemesis

      My students rib

      me all the time:

      you know who you look

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