Jo Page

--for Tadeusz Borowski (1922-51), author of Ladies and Gentlemen, This Way for the Gas Such innocence in apples, peeled— pale, pock-marked, but ominous. Pale, peeled apples not the orange excess of autumn; Instead--shorn heads, bald and pocked, the shorn heads of those in camps-- shorn of breath, later. (I am remembering the Polish writer and camp survivor, the suicide author.) All I am doing is making pies, pies with apples I have picked. I am not remembering history. Or I a

Okay, that post title sounds like an episode from Doctor Who. Or do I just create opportunities to allude to Doctor Who? Worse, am I using Doctor Who to lure unsuspecting readers into reading poetry? Of course not. So, I found a great book at a good house sale on Saturday. All those college/grad school poets under one cover: Hopkins and Frost, Auden and Eliot, cummings and Roethke. The modern poets. Well, they had been. Here's a poem by May Sarton I wish I'd written.

With Frost, it’s all about frost. He’s got a crop to harvest. That’s what it seems like. I don’t mind that he’s a curmudgeon. I heard he was a bad father. Who knows what kind of husband? I only know him as a poet, a swinger of birches—used to be, anyway. I know him as somebody who outwalked the furthest city lights, as one acquainted with the night. And so on. He didn’t know if the world would end in fire. Or in ice. And once by the pacific (should I say “Once by the Pacific”

The wind blew hot today; it blew my skirt— it whipped my skirt, but not as at Les Baux. Back then the denim flapped a furious code into the Val d’Enfer, those craggy hills, a giant’s rotted teeth. Linnea stood atop the highest battlement nearly windborne, all of fifteen. The wind blew hot in Bezier and we slept naked on the floor, ignorant of scorpions, me filled with local wine. We’d spent the day at the menhir near Minerve, along Canal du Midi. Arles and Olargues, Sommeil a

Takes longer to write a sonnet than it does to make the great, green elixir......and longer still to savor a plate of it on fettucine..... The basil—green, fresh-washed and dried, The oil virgin to the core, Garlic and cheese, both well-applied Are all you need and nothing more. That is, unless you want it more enriching with toasted and chopped-fine pignoli. Add butter, softened—so bewitching-- Cracked pepper makes the pesto holy. You whir the leaves in your machine, Then po

The sunflowers wave their heads around like girls and boys with unkempt hair and short attention spans. 'look, here! look, there!' they say, as if anyone is listening. They are unattended, like children at a Grown-ups party, left to themselves, and unruly. The Grown-ups are off discussing the serious work of Politicians and the new Book Someone has written. Someone is important and has won some prizes and also is serving on a Panel which is also part of a Colloquy