A.E. Stallings

Tu ne quaesieris …

The plum tree’s dying branch by branch,A candelabra going dark.Leaves ticket down, no avalanche,A gangrene inches through the bark.

Fruit trees are short-lived. So we’d heard.For years we thought its time had come;Yet each spring bridal blossoms stirredAnd each year purpled into plum.

One summertime will be its last –I think it’s this one. You do...

Central Athens

Too full of fret to sleep, I roseTo hear the grey of dawnAnd watch the shapes of things composeBefore the day turned on.A motorcycle one street overMade the morning shift(Or furtive homecoming from lover).The dark began to sift

Like coffee grounds. Then liquid, clear,As cool as water, brightAs sunlight striking windows, sheerMusic scaled a heightPast fire escapes, so that I heardA...

I saw nine dolphins once churn three by three         In echelons behind a ferry boat                  As though a combine harvested the sea,

Curving toward our wake as asymptote,         But only three at once above the brine.                  One...

(after visiting The World of Stonehenge at the British Museum)

For Ange Mlinko

When did museums devolve to the didacticSpelling out our wonder? Not enoughTo show us something wonderful – the tacticIs multimedia to smooth the roughEdges of the imagination – ‘thwacks’Piped in to whet the silence of an axe,

Or see: those skeletons of ponderous oxenSacrificed still...

Graveyard of St Peter-in-the-East, St Edmund Hall

For E.M.

Snowdrop, snowdrop, tell:what news of the underground,the weather in Hell?

Your toes are tickledby the beards of the dead, theirslanted stones deckled

and foxed with lichen-rings of shaggy galaxies.In flocks you beckon

me to read shallow-graven names on time-thumbed tomes.Soon you’ll sallow, snow-

drop: now so new, yetyour hair’s...