The book rotted by the rain, the clay that’s slipped,
the earth screeches, plates collapse,
the walls lose their grip on the paintings,
nothing is aligned like the planets we think we understand.
Within the shock announced this morning by the howling dogs

Pindar says the poet must guard the apples of the Muses
like a dragon, but I grew up among Christians,
I pierced my dragon side by scraping off the scales
the way I clean fish in the sink.
A barely saintly gesture, but surgical.
You need gloves, scissors,
and a lot of running water.
And listening to its splash I start to meditate.

Sweet runs the water ever
out of spring and meadow,
frothing low, rising,

a homely word:
a plosive, a long cry, a quiet stop, a silent letter
          like a storm and the end of a storm,

                I want to tell you, it has nothing to do with trees or luck, that the last carnations crumbling in the gutter, the float stripped down by the rain, even the drum major and the fireman, lifting their beers to the moon, are part of some other show, some other season, which the barkers have never known.

Giono wrote ‘A King Alone,’ his novel about a remote Alpine village tormented by a serial killer, after being blacklisted and imprisoned during World War II.

The genesis of “Channel,” a poem in our Fall 2016 issue.I grew up along the Susquehanna, and taught for many summers along the Tiber, and today most warm early mornings you’ll find me rowing my shell on the Schuylkill. I learned to row in middle ag…