Terza Rima

An Italian stanzaic form consisting of tercets with interwoven rhymes. A concluding couplet rhymes with the penultimate line of the last tercet.

As I drew nearer to the end of all desire,
I brought my longing's ardor to a final height,
Just as I ought. My vision, becoming pure,

Entered more and more the beam of that high light
That shines on its own truth. From...

                                    (1)

Nothing that exists can be
temporal; still I come to lay this stick
upon these altars, those three

definitions of sun, the border and thick
measure...

God said, “Men have forgotten Me:
The souls that sleep shall wake again,
     And blinded eyes must learn to see.”

So since redemption comes through pain
He smote the earth with chastening rod,
   And brought destruction's lurid reign;

But where His desolation trod
The people...

“I cannot quite remember.... There were five
Dropt dead beside me in the trench—and three
Whispered their dying messages to me....”

Back from the trenches, more dead than alive,
Stone-deaf and dazed, and with a broken knee,
He hobbled slowly,...

The job was easy: I tucked
them in, kicked off my shoes, listened for
the floor to go quiet. Everyone

slept except one: outside her door,
she paced, she hummed, holding
the edge of her torn

nightgown. Pointing, I told
her: to bed. Your bed. But she...

Force of reason, who shut up the shrill
foul Furies in the dungeon of the Parthenon,
led whimpering to the cave they live in still,

beneath the rock your city foundered on:
who, equivocating, taught revenge to sing
(or seem to, or be about to)...

I
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who...

What if   it were possible to vanquish
All this shame with a wash of   varnish
Instead of wishing the stain would vanish?

What if   you gave it a glossy finish?
What if   there were a way to burnish
All this foolishness, all the anguish?

What if...

I went to make kouign amann. It sounded Irish
and/or Maghrebi. But it’s Breton, as I can swear
by the blue hydrangea like a cloudy iris

I photographed near Finistère.
And now I’m here in Croton-on-Hudson
trying to remember what was sinister

about the asymmetrical cruets,
swan...

A full year passed (the seasons keep me honest)
since I last noticed this same commotion.
Who knew God was an abstract expressionist?

I’m asking myself—the very question
I asked last year, staring out at this array
of racing colors, then set in motion

by the...

i

Between the vision of the Tourist Board and the true   
Paradise lies the desert where Isaiah’s elations   
force a rose from the sand. The thirty-third canto

cores the dawn clouds with concentric radiance,
the breadfruit opens its palms in praise of the bounty,   
bois-pain, tree...

BOOK SIX


Chapter XLIV

I

In hill-towns, from San Fernando to Mayagüez,   
the same sunrise stirred the feathered lances of cane   
down the archipelago’s highways. The first breeze

rattled the spears and their noise was like distant rain   
marching down from the hills, like a shell at...

My mother's maids, when they did sew and spin,
They sang sometime a song of the field mouse,
That, for because her livelood was but thin,

Would needs go seek her townish sister's house.
She thought herself endurèd too much pain;
The...

Swift as a spirit hastening to his task
Of glory & of good, the Sun sprang forth
Rejoicing in his splendour, & the mask
Of darkness fell from the awakened Earth.
The smokeless altars of the mountain snows
Flamed above crimson clouds, & at the...