Interior with Portrait of Savonarola
Kirchwey, Karl
Interior with Portrait of Savonarola The winter sun, angling across the south pasture, catches his mason jar where it waits on the window-sill, mute and rimed with uric salts, and makes it...
...KARL KIRCHWEY...
...On the wall's a unicorn in white pastel, done by their last-born...
...The woodstove's cold...
...Darkness is streaming from the priest's habit, the feathers of the crow, fed by the jar's crystal mouth, the glazed flank of the bed, the concealed smile of linen...
...It is too late to be bitter...
...Interior with Portrait of Savonarola The winter sun, angling across the south pasture, catches his mason jar where it waits on the window-sill, mute and rimed with uric salts, and makes it glitter...
...a crow perched on a tree...
...the desk is closed...
...It is too late to speak of faults...
...Before they burned Savonarola, they scratched his fingernails with glass: the frost-flowers on the window grow like that, like purposes...
...a golden-haired angel and (more of his whimsy) Savonarola in profile, who said, "My purposes were few, but they were great...
...the high carved bed seems narrow to have kept them both so long, and at its foot's a cedar chest containing linen she air-dried and folded away sweet last summer...
Vol. 131 • November 2004 • No. 20
