Cover Art: The gatekeepers, by Dastid Miluka. Mixed media on paper, 2019, 42 x 30 cm. Private Collection. For inquiries about this piece, please contact us at art@thebrusselsreview.com.

For James Benning

Zeus presents a hidden smile,
the sapling-carve, the landscape
holds, a moment more, its shape;
something, somewhere, unseen life,
a world freight as water.

There is no ice, nor proper dark,
flush-sheen blush portends
the dawn; the touch of weary
welkin-wood; of wrapt-abasement, shrine.

Sprachbund

For Manoel de Oliveira

Too quick the rites, exhaust,
patience of no earthy claim.
Shining stones covalent pledge
a life aside, obscene, fraught salvage
of the isolate.

Time works no annulments,
each etching sharp as plumstones.
Vibrancy, the lovers’ cleave,
the wound that screams emancipate.

One Sings

Acrid-sweet accumulates, oblique at lex talionis,
enormous vantage of an autumn dusk,
pressed against whatever, in the city,
does not fold. Fraught discloses, in
its way, a world apart, cantabile,
the quince-tree spread we feasted on.

And offered us, throneless altar
a gate of strange and rare device,
no more than what was needed,
translations of obscurest sanctify:
one chance to cross the threshold,
one chant to roll the dice.

Four Last Songs

White the last, the bodiless—
no shade nor shadow to refract.
There must be somewhere roughshod green,
the private path as wends the sea.
Blanched tresses congeal to the air,
an x apportions space, ribs of sky.

Every piece enfolds itself
and surface frictive lens
as axe receives the wood.
Mirror-flaked in silence, tongues alike,
you see, friend, the plenitude,
the fruits that ripen in the dark.

Not less the purple horn,
nor hunting party in the snow;
landscape-flecks, still to sough
the touch of hymnal wine in wind,
still, at last, to sing.

Homage to Pierre de Ronsard

The end, perhaps, of rose,
the etherglow. No stare of lapis-blue
but something real, engrained.
In those frames of frühbarock,
of space on space invades.

Yours the rose, ours magasin,
soft recirculation whereby the folk
find kreise soft as commerce,
the fruit as nectar sweet.

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